Dânesh Zaki

Munnar!

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:10:29 +0530

I visited Munnar, a beautiful hill resort in Kerala, India with family this week. I try to relive the trip in this post.

We started from Chennai by the Alappuzha express around 9 PM and reached Erankulam Junction at 10 AM. The train was an hour late but the pleasant weather and the scenery on the way made sure that we were not too bothered by the delay.

A view from the train

Another view from the train

From Ernakulam station, we took a cab to Munnar - a distance of 160 KM.The drive on the hill is very scenic - some of the shots are right out of a postcard.

Scenic view of a tea estate enroute to the top

There are several tea estates in Munnar; most of them belong to Tata Tea. You will find Kanan Devan mentioned in many places - it is brand owned by Tata Tea.

Many such amazing views greet the traveler

We were able to see three waterfalls on the way up. The water in them seemed clean, thanks to people not bathing in it.

This is my favourite shot of one of the three waterfalls

We visited the “Spice Garden”, an area with a guided tour of the trees and plants that grow in that region.

A bright red flower in the “Spice Garden”

The drive from Ernakulam Junction to Munnar town takes about 4.5 hours. If you spend more time around the waterfalls or clicking snaps, this can go up by over an hour. We stayed in Siena Village, a further 20 km away from Munnar town. The food was good but the service was not so. The USP of this resort in my opinion, is the amazing view that you get from the room.

Clouds can cover the region fast

We also visited the Mattupetty dam - rainwater dam and Echo Point - an area near a lake where if you shout loud enough you might hear an echo (pics not worth posting). We also went on an exciting elephant ride where the elephants trek up a slope!

Fencing at the waterfall to prevent people getting in and dirtying the area

Thanks to our driver I was able to get a long shot of the waterfall

A beautiful shot to round off this post

We returned back to Chennai by the same train, boarding at Ernakulam Junction at 5.20 PM and arriving at 6.20 AM in Chennai. I was not impressed by the Ernakulam junction station as it neither had a good public announcement system nor a clear indication of coach positions from engine. This led us to a minor chaos while boarding the train. But the train stops for over 10 minutes giving people sufficient time to board (we were traveling with a 2 year old infant).

For people planning trips to Munnar, I recommend setting aside 2-3 additional days for the house boat in Alappuzha and visting Thekkady. These are definitely on our agenda for our forthcoming trips.

For now though, we will be revisiting Munnar in our dreams!

Eid Mubarak!

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:55:30 +0530

After 30 days of abstaining from food and carnal desires, it is the hope and prayer of every fasting person that their souls have been cleansed to a certain extent. Eid Ul-Fitr is an occassion that is “earned” by self-conditioning unlike other occassions such as weddings and public holidays that come to happen regardless. For this reason, it gives the Muslims a sense of great satisfaction and joy.

Typical activities during the day of Eid start with visiting the mosque for the early morning prayer, then again for the special prayer and then followed by meeting and embracing of relatives and friends. In India and probably throughout the sub-continent, “Eidi” (money) is given to children by elders, gifts are also exchanged. Friends (both Muslims and non-Muslims) are invited for lunch/dinner and eagerly look forward to the Biryani!

After this, many people choose to spend the evening out or continue visiting relatives and friends. For me though, in the past few Eids that have gone by, a relaxing nap in the afternoon has been the norm.

Here is wishing everyone a happy Eid and God willing, we will have an opportunity next Ramadan again for more introspection and soul cleansing.

Photos courtesy:
Mosque: Flickr stream of Radiant Guy
Biryani: Flickr stream of Pengrin

Tweet Relevancy: The Next Killer Feature For Twitter Clients

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:23:45 +0530

As the number of followers increase, so does the volume of tweets that one sees on his/her Twitter stream. Do all of the tweets matter? How do we know which are the ones that interest us without sifting through the deluge of tweets? I have tried to put together a set of criteria based on which tweets could be presented to the user. The tweets following this criteria may not necessarily be ordered chronologically . The critieria that I have chosen to distinguish tweets are:

Who
What
When
How
Where

Most Relevant Criteria
The most relevant ones among the list above are the Who, What and When. As listed, there can be at least four categories of people with whom a person interacts with (Others can be expanded to office colleagues, relatives, experts etc). Tweets from people in these groups will have a precedence in that order. But it may not be a straight forward decision as the What comes into picture. Tweets could be text statuses or links. And of course spam, though one would not expect known folks to spam, but you never know. So, now it becomes a question of setting the rules: is a tweet with a link from a Close Friend of higher relevance than a text tweet from an acquaintance? These are the rules that one would have leave the user to decide. The client software should provide an option to customize these rules as per the user’s preferences. When a tweet was tweeted is also an important criteria as people are not interested in reading stale news. This should also be part of the rules interface.

What is not Relevant?
I am not looking to much at how or from where the tweet was created. If and when Twitter provides GPS capabilities tightly coupled with tweets, the Where part might get interesting.

Other Criteria
The things that are missing from the list are Hash Tags. Hash tags are a category of their own just like tags in a blog post. These should provide an alternative to the above list of criteria for selecting tweets to read. Also, in general, the criteria should be customizable, as what one user looks for may not be what another does.

As you may have noticed, this post does not cover replies and direct messages. When these are addressed to the user reading the tweets, he/she may put these at a a higher priority than the criteria listed. When replies are addressed to other users whom the current user is following, the tweet will fall under the text-real stuff criteria.

Conclusion
To conclude, we need smarter clients (web/desktop/mobile/other) that provide the ability to set/customize rules in order to make sense of the deluge of tweets that come one’s way. I hope the big ones such as Tweet Deck, Twitterific and maybe the interface for premium Twitter accounts (?) think about this and implement it in their future releases. Till then, keep sifting!

Video

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 01:35:31 +0530

TrueRoots Ad - Very true!

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 01:15:34 +0530

TrueRoots Ad - Very true!

Amazing Evian ad!

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:34:10 +0530

Amazing Evian ad!

The Making of Nokia N97

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:01:26 +0530

The Making of Nokia N97

"I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each..."

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:56:31 +0530

““I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!””

- German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord in Truppenführung, 1933

The Swine Flu Scare

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:15:58 +0530

I always look forward to my journey back home as it usually brings me thoughts about good food, relaxed life and of course family! This time however, I started from Vernon Hills less enthusiastically, with a fear of Swine flu - the disease with symptoms as common as the common flu yet deadly enough to cause death (or so the media would have us believe).

I tried buying a mask to wear on my journey back home but could not get one so stuffed myself with several paper tissues (its a different thing that I never got to use them as much). Two long flights and 24 hours later, I reached home dead tired due to lack of sleep and harassed by the airline over missing baggage. I was checked at the airport for fever and was let go as I did not have any temperature. But after a day, I had mild fever which came and went a couple of times. According to the pamphlets given to me on swine flu, I could develop symptoms within 7 days of arrival, so I decided to do a medical checkup. I called up the Center of Communicable Diseases Hospital to check on where the test needed to be done. The lady attendant answering the phone just asked me when and where I had returned from, what symptoms I had and immediately thought that I had swine flu. She said that I would have to get myself tested at King Institute in Guindy and get admitted in a special ward in the General Hospital. What?! I was not even tested yet and I was already a patient?

I grudgingly started for King Institute mentally picturizing myself in the GH ward along with other patients. On my way, I received a call from my office stating that they had a tie-up with Ranbaxy labs where I could do the test. I felt much better and headed there. My medical test was done and the doctor did a general medical check and advised me not to get carried away with the media hype on swine flu. He said that in most cases with good precautions and nutrition, the patients recovered fairly quickly. By evening, the results of my blood test were out and I was greatly relieved to find out that everything was normal and said out aloud “Poda panni! Jaare Suvvar!” (Tamil & Urdu phrases meaning “Get lost pig!”).

Cool ad by Intel on the “geek rock stars”. Ajay...

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 09:58:56 +0530

Cool ad by Intel on the “geek rock stars”. Ajay Bhatt shown in the ad is not the real guy. The real one is here

Toyota Qualis by DC Chabria

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:04:00 +0530

Never thought that a Toyota Qualis could look this good. DC Chabria does wonders.

Set your expectations right. Drawing by Hugh Macleod

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:31:00 +0530

Set your expectations right. Drawing by Hugh Macleod

Limo in Vernon Hills

Mon, 25 May 2009 02:24:00 +0530

I haven’t seen a limousine from this close. This one was parked just outside the hotel where I was staying. It is a Lincoln.

In Vernon Hills near Chicago

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:07:00 +0530

Reached Vernon Hills, a suburb about 34 miles away from Chicago, yesterday. The weather is pleasant here as summer has seemingly started. The taxi driver who drove me to the hotel from the Chicago O’ Hare airport was an Indian who had studied for his masters degree here. His job contract with AT&T was terminated early this year and he had to start driving taxis to make ends meet. I had found it difficult to believe stories on recession in the US but this one was true and was in front of me.

RAM on USB

Tue, 12 May 2009 22:45:44 +0530

I was trying to install a software on my ageing laptop and had issues due to lack of disk space. Ruthlessly, I cleaned my hard disk - deleting some files and moving many to a portable hard disk. This made things good enough to install the software.

When trying to run the software, I had a problem as it needed 2-4 GB RAM while I had only 1 GB. Increasing virtual memory, swap size etc did not help much. That is when I thought that it would have been great had a USB-based portable RAM chip/drive existed. One could plug it in just like a portable hard disk/flash memory drive and the laptop would take whatever additional RAM needed from it.

This idea generated quite a bit of interest when I discussed it with colleagues. And I do hope that Seagate, SanDisk, Kingston and others feel excited to hear this and design it for us.

My trips in the past few years. Africa, South America and...

Sat, 09 May 2009 15:54:09 +0530

My trips in the past few years.

Africa, South America and Australia are yet to host me

Chennai Rail Accident

Fri, 01 May 2009 22:12:00 +0530

Having been a commuter on the suburban trains myself, I was greatly saddened to know about the rail accident that happened yesterday at Vyasarpadi Jiva. These trains are known to be safe with accidents being caused only due to people crossing the tracks inadvertently or due to passengers hanging outside the coaches and getting hit by external objects. But I do not recall any accident involving Chennai suburban commuter trains of this magnitude in the past 15 years.

There were several theories doing the rounds yesterday including one that likened this to the 9/11 attacks where pilots hijacked planes. Security in railway stations in Chennai as with other cities is virtually non-existent. In the Chennai Central Station, it is limited to a few areas and not very seriously taken. It is time we started treating security in railway stations on par with that of airports, as this is the second major incident after the Mumbai terror attacks involving a railway station. Some of the steps the authorities could take are:

Installing a camera in the driver’s compartment of the train and in every station to record entry of visitors
Easier means of turning power off in the suburban train
Training the railway staff on acting in emergencies
Controlling access to the driver’s compartment through electronic access

Hope the railway authorities take cue from this incident and take adequate measures to provide passengers a safe environment for travel.

Bamboo phones - Simon Enever

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:08:00 +0530

Bamboo phones - Simon Enever

Taxi Ride Across Saudi Arabia

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:34:23 +0530

After performing the Umrah, a friend and I started around 9 PM from Makkah to Jeddah.We had planned to start at 8.30 PM but things got delayed. The flight was at 10.30 PM and we thought that it would be tight but we would make it around 10 PM. Also, since we had boarding passes issued from our onward journey itself, we thought that we could go straight to the gate. The heavy traffic meant that we could reach the airport around 10.15 PM and rushed to the gate only to find that the flight had left! We checked the Saudi Airlines counters for alternative flights, only to find none as it was the weekend. We then decided to try the bus stand which was half way across the city.

We reached the bus stand around midnight and were tempted by a taxi driver who said that he would drop us in Dammam in 8 hours. As the bus takes 14 hours to Dammam, we got tempted and got in. The distance between Jeddah and Dammam is around 1200 km.

The taxi driver had told us that he would charge SR 220 for two persons till Dammam but after a while 3 more guys got in and we could barely sit. At 220 KM/hr with blaring Saudi music and lots of cigarettes, we reached Riyadh in 6 hours. On the way, at a petrol bunk the filling guy (Indian) warned me not to travel in a taxi driven by a Saudi as his friend was missing since he got into one. Too late, I thought. And the thought only helped ruin whatever little sleep I could have got. We changed taxis at Riyadh and got to Dammam and eventually to Jubail crossing miles and miles of desert. We reached Jubail at around 10.45 AM, 10 hours late and poorer by SR 370 but way richer in experience.

Umrah

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:46:46 +0530

I performed Umrah the minor pilgrimage (Haj being the major one) to Makkah last month. Unlike Haj, Umrah can be performed at any time of the year. I wore Ihram, the attire for the pilgrimage and started from Dammam (the city with an airport closest to Jubail). To reach Makkah, one has to fly in to Jeddah and take a taxi.

On arrival at Makkah and reaching the Kaaba - the black cube-like structure, I performed the Tawaf, circambulation of the Kaaba. Then I proceeded to perform Saee - going back and forth on the hillocks of Safa and Marwa. After this, I cut a little of my hair as required by the ritual.

It felt very peaceful sitting near the Kaaba in the evening and the feeling was so overwhelming that I missed the return flight back to Dammam!

*First and third photos courtesy Mostafa Mohammed