Soumenlinna (literally Finland’s Castle in Finnish) or Sveborg (Fortress of Svea in Sweden) is a UNESCO World Heritage site built on an a group of islands south-east of Helsinki in the Baltic sea. It is accessible by the water ferries that ply across the sea from Helsinki. The ramparts of the forts are star-shaped and consists of many fortifications made of large mounds of sand. (called Skansen in Swedish – literally meanings fortifications or fort walls).

The fortress itself is inhabited and there are a number of cafes and restaurants to cater to the gaggle of picnicking Helsinkians (Not Helsinkers !! however tempted you are to use that word !!). The fortress also has Finland’s smallest official beach just a few metres across (see below). Suomenlinna was used during the Second World War as one of Helsinki’s air surveillance centres and served as a garrison until 1972. Today it houses the Finnish Naval War Academy. It also houses the Helsinki open prison. A substantial part of the repairs to the walls, ramparts and buildings are carried out by convicts.

Interestingly, Soumenlinna was built by a Swedish King (when Finland was still a part of Sweden 250 years ago) to guard against Russia whose increasing maritime power in the Gulf of Finland made the Swedes uneasy. Soumenlinna contains a shipbuilding yard that is now defunct. The Soumenlinna Church was built originally in Greek Orthodox Style with five onion domes. Later it was converted into Lutheran Church (Most Finnish are Lutheran Christians). Today, the main dome of the church doubles up as a lighthouse. The light in the Lighthouse signals the morse code for the letter ‘H’ (for Helsinki) and is one of the first landmark for vessels approaching Helsinki.

The Sibelius Monument (more info) is one of the must-see places in Helsinki. It is an interesting Abstract Art sculpture made by Eila Hiltunen to commemorate Jean Sibelius – A celebrated Finnish composer whose work was instrumental in the formation of the Finnish Identity. The Finlandia Concert Hall built by Alvar Alto is named after a one of his most famous compositions. The sculpture itself is made of acid-proof stainless steel pipes that are welded together individually to form the distinctive abstract shape.

The Helsinki Harbour

The Helsinki harbour is beautiful by night. The photo below (of a bridge and the power station) was taken while going to a Madonna concert that night.

Finland and Russia have a troubled past though relations are very cordial right now. Finland was a part of Russia for more than 100 years before it was annexed by Swedish Empire. Finland was attacked by Russia during World War II and some symbols of Russia in Helsinki (see photo below – the two-headed eagle in the Helsinki Harbour) still remind of this uneasy past. Russian Ships were docked in the harbour and heavily guarded when I visited it.

The Olympic Stadium

The Olympic Stadium in Helsinki (and the tall tower beside the stadium) are iconic. The stadium was built for hosting the 1940 Olympics which was canceled due to World War II but hosted the 1952 Olympics. The tall tower beside the stadium offers great views of the entire city. The Finnish football team was practicing when I visited it. On the board inside the stadium,there are quite a few recognizable names amongst those who have set records here – Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin (both Sprinters), Moses Kiptanui and Haile Gebrselassie (both have held several long distance running records). Outside the stadium, there is a statue of the “Flying Finn” – Paavo Nurmi – who has won 12 Olympic medals and is considered one of the greatest track and field athletes of all time.

Helsinki Cathedral

The Helsinki cathedral (or St. Nicholas’ Church) is the distinctive landmark in Helsinki with it’s green domes and and bright white exterior. It looks stunning standing on a top of a hill with stairs leading to it and is considered as the unofficial symbol of the Helsinki city.

The corridor discussions with a bunch of Hadoop committers were insightful. I also found out more about Mahout. Mahout is a Apache project to build scalable machine learning libraries. It is not restricted to Hadoop implementations, but much of the current activity seems to be around Hadoop.

Notes and embedded slides from the sessions I attended follow:

Hadoop summit Keynote

Data Management on Grid

Notes:

• Y! uses a HDFS replication factor of 3 (the hadoop default) in most cases. Exceptions are big clusters with large number of applications running simultaneously.
• Y! does not use Avro yet due to large amount of legacy data. Twitter uses Avro.
• Data ingestion layer uses MapReduce for heavy lifting and format conversion for storage.
• LZO is used for compression. gzip (not ideal due to non-block-level indexing) and bzip2 is also used. There are problems with slowness of bzip2 decompression but bzip2 delivers better compression ratios.
• Data ingestion layer also oversees policy for data retention and purging.
• Underlying filesystems is rarely a bottleneck for Hadoop. Mostly the synchronization semantics of HDFS is a bottleneck. A file operation is not successful until all the replicas are in sync.

Machine Learning using Hadoop

Notes:

• There are clear differences between data mining and machine learning.
• ML is harder to implement efficiently on Hadoop. Improving efficiency is still a research problem.
• Hadoop creates one map job / block creating too many empty files and also many reducers.

Optimizing and Benchmarking Hadoop

Notes:

• As a thumb rule, adding as much memory as money can buy is a a good idea for Hadoop
• Consider Network connections as shuffle stage does heavy network I/O
• Solid state disks might make sense at certain price/performance ratios. They are also more power efficient.

Tuning Hadoop To Deliver Performance To Your Application

Notes:

• Several parameters to tune Hadoop but must be used in conjunction with each other.
• Set number of map jobs slightly more than number of cores to ensure better utilization. Makes sure that data is processed in waves. Also better network utilization (as shuffle phase happens parallely with Map phase) along with CPU scheduling
• Choosing a good HDFS block size is important. Number of HDFS blocks is directly proportional to number of Map tasks generated

Links to all presentations

• Hadoop Summit Keynote – USage inside Yahoo and Statistics
• Marketing presentation – Yahoo’s committment to Hadoop and Opensource
• Data Management on Grid
• Machine Learning using Hadoop
• Multiple Sequence Alignment Using Hadoop
• Optimizing and Benchmarking Hadoop
• Challenges And Uniqueness Of Quality Engg And Release Engg Processes In Hadoop
• Tuning Hadoop To Deliver Performance To Your Application

This time we had a similar format as the previous Headstart. The on-stage demo and demo-pit were provided free of cost to the startups (We only charged for registration of the startups). The startups made good use of the demo-pit space. A few startups generated quite a bit of buzz including Notion-ink (makers of the Adam Tablet PC), Robosoft Systems (Makers of duct cleaning robot), Sysblitz (on-demand Business applications), Youpid (Tapping into the marriage market using social networks), Go-live gaming (Educational products using gaming) and Innoz (A student startup from Kerala that makes mobile applications for filesharing).

The complete list of selected startups

Two of the panels “Unconventional Sources of funding” and “Business Plan mistakes” were well received by packed halls. The questions posed to the panelists and the conversations with the attendees during the conference pointed to the fact that the startup scene in Hyderabad is still nascent and needs to mature as compared to Mumbai and Bangalore. We were happy to help connect many people in Hyderabad through the Headstart event and our regular Startup Saturdays there.

More coverage

• On Twitter
• On Swaroop’s Blog – one of the panelists on “Unconventional sources of funding”
• On the Youpid Blog – one of the startups in the demo-pit

In Helsinki, my couchsurfing host was studying and working to become a nuclear scientist. It was interesting having conversations about physics, linux and other geek stuff with him. I would stay in Helsinki for 3 days eventually mostly walking around the city and taking pictures and talking to the locals. Helsinki is a pretty small city and it is possible to cover all the interesting places on foot and that is exactly what I did. It helped that most of the time I had a good company from local couchsurfers.

The Church in the Rock

The Church in the Rock (Temppeliaukion kirkkois - “Temple Square Church” in Finnish) one of the offbeat and must-see locations in Helsinki. It lives up to it’s name and looks like a a rock cave from the outside. From the inside, the huge roof looks like an overturned saucer and the from above it looks like a crashed flying saucer. Due to this, It is colloquially called as the “UFO church”. It has a minimalistic architecture and has great acoustics so concerts are held inside the church frequently.

Töölönlahti and the National Parliament

Töölönlahti is a bay located norwest of the central station and is a jogger’s paradise. It is natural park that is surrounded by Finlandia Concert hall and the National Opera (see below for the photo of Hooks used to hang coats in the cold winters). Various ducks and birds abound in this rare natural reserve in the center of a thriving city. The National Parliament building is pretty massive and right next to the National Museum. The Parliament annex has metal sculptures of strawberry plants and magnolias (see below)

The National Museum of Finland

Somone from Schmap noticed the photo below and it has was included in the schmap guide for the iPhone. Ironically I did not visit the museum as there were more interesting things to do that day.

Bekal Fort is the largest and most well preserved of all the forts in Kerala. Bekal fort is more than 300 years old and was occupied by Hyder Ali and his more illustrious son Tipu Sultan. The fort occupies an area of about 40 odd acres and is beautifully preserved by the Archaeological Survey of India. One of the watchtowers of the fort stretches into the Arabian sea and looks like a giant keyhole while the other one in the center of the fort has a steep ramp to climb to the top. Both of these provide beautiful vistas of the Arabian Sea and the beautiful coastline.

It is a easy bus ride to Bekal fort (about 16 kms and ~40 minutes). Bekal also has a railway station and you can see the railway line skirting the open sea from one of the fort watchtowers. The song “Tu Hi Re” from the Mani Ratnam movie “Bombay” was shot here. While I was there, I saw several post-marriage videos being shot there (looks like they had been inspired by the movie).

We recently visited a couchsurfer’s coffee estate near Sakleshpur. Travelling overnight with a bunch of couchsurfers, we took a break before dawn on NH48 just ahead of Sakleshpur. We climbed our way in the darkness to the Manjarabad fort. Tipu Sultan is said to have built this fort as it is in a strategic location close to the Arabian Sea coast through the Sakleshpur Ghat. The Manjarabad fort (pictured in the map above) is constructed out of stones and mud in the form of a 8-pointed star with large moat around it. While inspecting the construction of the fort, Tipu Sultan is said to have observed fog (known in Kannada as “Manju”) around this place and decided to name this fort Manjarabad. True to it’s name, there was heavy fog around the foothills before sunrise. The local taluka headquarters is still known by this name despite the town being renamed Sakleshpur.

Last weekend I went to the Fireflies festival of Music. Fireflies festival was relatively less known underground indie festival on the outskirts of Bangalore but has become popular over the years. This years edition had several good bands crossing various genres and covering everything from traditional and experimental sounds of Kerala to sufi inspired hymns to Lounge Piranha’s alternative grunge and Low Rhyderz Reggae and Hiphop.

I reached a little late around 7pm and stayed through the night through till the last two acts. All the acts were very good and the variety was staggering. The only downside was the time taken to setup the stage and occasional problems with the sound setup.

Esperanto Soul Fusion

With Geeta Navale on the Veena, the esperanto project had some funky psychedelic sounds combined with Carnatic music.

HFT Jazz

Shabnam Virmani rendtion of “Kabir ke dohe”

Shabnam Virmani – Filmmaker-turned-singer regaled the audience with her soulful rendition of couplets of Kabir. She explained the meaning of the couplets before singing them. Her performance got a fantastic response from the audience.

Hulivesa

Definitely the highlight if the evening was Huilvesa – a traditional dance from coastal Karnataka. Hulivesa (Loose Tulu translation “In the form of a tiger”) is performed by young males typically aged between 5 years to 10 years are painted with yellow and black stripes like tiger adorning tiger masks and other props. The kids dance to a familiar drumbeat and perform various acts such as eating a coconut and doing acrobatic acts.

Lounge Piranha

Lounge Piranha are a post-rock alternative grunge band. They performed several songs from their released (and upcoming) albums. They played some good guitar riffs. The lead singer had a wry sense of humour and kept making jibes at “world music”.

Qawwali – Bharat Sargam and group

The Qawwali troupe got the audience on their feet by playing some popular songs such as “Jhoom Barabar Jhoom” and “Mast Kalandar”. There was almost a mini riot when the audience wanted to play one more song but the organisers wouldn’t relent and let them play the request.

Vayali – Traditional Kerala songs and experimental bamboo orchestra

Vayali started with an experimental bamboo orchestra in which all the instruments (mainly percussion) were made of Bamboo. They ended their performance with traditional Kerala songs.

Low Rhyderz

Low Rhyderz is a Hip-Hop/Reggae band. Probably the least interesting on all the performances, they were not able to engage the audiences like the other artistes. They were high on style but disappointingly low on entertainment.

Along the small coat of Karnataka are several small pilgrimage places such as Murudeshwar, Udupi and Gokarna. Each of these town has a different character and has some unique characteristics. Two of the three towns – Murudeshwar and Gokarna have been mentioned in the Ramayana while Udupi is famous for it’s ancient Krishna temple. Most people associate Udupi with food but there are very few good places to eat in Udupi itself, which is surprising considering that you get Udupi restaurants dime-a-dozen in most South Indian cities. Udupi is also much smaller than I had imagined it to be. The city has grown about 2 km radius around the temple which is located in the centre. The day we reached there, preparations were on for the chariot-car festivals and decorated car-chariots dominated the entrances to the temple complex. The Malpe beach is one of the few white-sand beaches in India but we had to skip it as we headed towards Murudeshwara.

Murudeshwara is famous for the Murudeshwara (shiva) temple and the world’s largest Shiva statue. It also has a beautiful virgin beach and the water is very clear making it a good place to go scuba diving (Netrani Island). Murudeshwara is surrounded on three sides by the sea and the temple is located on the rock jutting out to Sea. Under the huge Shiva statue by the sea is another temple. The temple is surrounded on three sides by a exhibit which explains the mythological origins of the ‘Linga’ worshipped in the temple dating back to the Ramayana. Another notable feature of the Murudeshwara temple is the huge gopuram (Raja Gopuram – about 250 ft tall) at the entrance of the temple. It has 20 stories and is probably the tallest gopuram in the world. Murudeshwara is a hidden gem on the Karnataka coast.

]]>http://thoughts.vinayakhegde.com/2010/02/12/udupi-and-murudeshwara/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/VinayakH/~3/eS9OKXT88OE/ 2010-02-02T04:25:29Z Vinayak Hegde Last year I had been to a friend’s place and seen a painting at her place which I liked a lot. She said she had bought it at Chitra Santhe. Chitra Santhe is typically held on the last Sunday of January every year along the Kumara Krupa Road. This year it was crowded and buzzing [...]

Last year I had been to a friend’s place and seen a painting at her place which I liked a lot. She said she had bought it at Chitra Santhe. Chitra Santhe is typically held on the last Sunday of January every year along the Kumara Krupa Road. This year it was crowded and buzzing with activity and I saw several people carrying cartloads of paintings. This year, Chitra Santhe attracted more than 1300 artists and the road was choc-a-bloc with paintings of various styles. Also every other person seemed to carry a DSLR to take pictures of the artists and paintings. I did not carry my camera but the fair was a treat for the eyes. I bought a series of paintings depicting dances of India – Odissi, Bharatnatyam and Kathak. If you are in Bangalore during that time of the year, this is one event you should not miss.