My Royal Enfield Thunderbird Twinspark

Recently i bought a Royal Enfield Thunderbird twinspark red color from Erragadda showroom at hyderabad. Its my dream to buy a Royal Enfield Thunderbird and i waited for so long to get one. Now its my most priced possession ( of course its costly as well ;-) ) . I am just waiting for my first service to get over so that i can cruise to some nearby places.
From the day i bought 350cc monster i have been getting a lot of attention from lot of people. Either its my office or on the road , people stop to take a look at it and ask about it. There is always a special respect and treatment for all the bullets which has over 50 year old attachment to our indian roads .
It was just my second day after i got my bike and trying to cross a signal at peak traffic time and it was too congested. There was a volvo bus which was abstructing everyone. To my amazement the bus driver gave way for me to go ahead and in the next signal we met again.Now he started asking lot of questions about my Thunderbird. I am very sure that no other so called bikes on the road might have got such a Royal treatment other than an Enfield.
Now its been about 10 days since i got my bike and i am absolutely enjoying the bike , be it the thumping sound or the pick up or the slow speed cruise , its amazing. As the tagline of Enfield goes , "Built like a Gun, Goes like a bullet" perfectly matches it. Its sturdy design make it very robust on the road and gives a great riding comfort and posture. Its the Harley Davidson of indian roads. And to my amazement my Thunderbird twinspark gives me a 40kmpl mileage that too before the first service. The Thunderbird twinspark when maintained well would give you a decent 45+kmpl. After using it now for about 10 days , i feel that all other bikes are like kids bike. One of my friend had bought a new Honda shine and i had a test ride on it. I was feeling something like driving a tri-cycle ;-).


With my Thunderbird twinspark.

Trip to Bhadrachalam & Papikondalu

Last weekend we were able to make it to bhadrachalam and papikondalu , which i had been thinking of visiting for a long time. Fortunately it happened to be one of my colleagues' marriage at Kothagudam which is about 1 hour from Bhadrachalam. So we planned for this wonderful and scenic place called Papikodalu which is on the great river Godavari.
People believe that Badhrachalam is the place where Lord Rama went for his 14 year exile ( vana vaasam).
Day April 18, 2009.
We had to start very early in the morning about 5.30AM from Kothagudam as we were told that the boats to Papikondalu starts at 8.00 and we cant afford to miss it. So we reached Badhrachalam by Auto which takes about 1 hour. From Badhrachalam again we had to take a bus to the place where the boating starts which took us about 2 hours. Being summer season, the water was very less in Godavari river in the upper stream. But as went downstream in the river more water was brought in by its tributory Sabari.
Since it was off-season the boat ride started only at 10.30 AM. The boat ride totally last for about 5 hours in which they take you till Papikondalu which is in the downstream and again back to the starting point. They also serve you food which is prepared in the boat and the total cost of the ride is only Rs. 250.
On the way they stop you at village where the tribals live. Here there is a small temple which is covered by lush greenaries and a small stream of water run near the temple.
After sometime they had stopped the boat near the stretch of Papikondalu where our lunch was served. At this place the river converges into a very narrow one in between the mountains. The total width of the river near Bhadrachalam is about 1.2 km and when the river reaches Papikondalu , its squeezed into a mere 500 metres by the mountains and making the currents
stronger and the river more deeper. This place is a scenic beauty where you can see the river bending to the power of the mountains.






On the way to the boating point.













Myself , Sindhu and Praveen near the boating point.










The boat which we took.














Beautiful shores of river godavari.












Mountains along banks of Godavari.













A tribal village on the shores on godavari. A small beautiful temple is over here.












A small stream which was running near the temple.













At Papikondalu. Look at the river getting narrower due to the mountains.













Sunset at river godavari.







They brought us back to the starting point at about 3.30PM. From here again we reached back to Bhadhrachalam at about 5.30PM. It was the rite time for us to get the much awaited bath in the river Godavari. It was a beautiful scene to watch the sunset in the river godavari which is just behind the Bhadhrachalam temple. After having a nice bath in the river we went to the temple and we were out from the temple by 7.30.

Then we got a bus at 9.30 and started out return journey to Hyderabad.

Difference between < iostream> and < iostream.h>

We have been recently encountering lot of problems in the code due to the difference between and . I was thinking that there may not be much difference between and . This leads to lot of porting issues. Found out a nice article which explains about the difference. Check this out.
http://members.gamedev.net/sicrane/articles/iostream.html

Increasing mplayer volume beyond 100%

I had to recompile my mplayer from source because my recent update using apt-get was not working properly with my graphics card. While doing so i found out lot of very useful features in mplayer that can be used. In players like VLC player you can increase volume upto 400% i thought you cannot do this on mplayer. This would specially help you if you are using a laptop speaker, which generally produce very less volume.

Here are some of useful options:

-softvol ( it uses the software mixer instead of your sound card. So it helps you in increasing the volume above 100% )

-softvol-max <10.0-10000.0> ( you can specify a range between 10 and 10000 - So actually i am using value as 400. So i can increase volume upto 400% . Increasing the volume above )

-display ( this might be useful when you work on a VNC or a remote machine. It ll display the output on another machine. )



You can also put all these configurations in the config file: ( ~/.mplayer/config )

# Write your default config options here!
softvol=1
softvol-max=400
#stop-xscreensaver=1
zoom=1
vm=1

The Monk who sold his ferrari

Its been quite sometime since i made any post here due to various reasons. I have been doing a bit of reading these days. It was during one of my weekends i ended up in a book shop and my friend suggest me this book "The Monk who sold his Ferrari" by Robin Sharma. I have never read any books like these before which mainly deals with self motivation, power of your mind and stuff. Though its more of a philosophical stuff i like this one because of the way the author says it.
And last weekend ended up Ramoji Film city along with friends from my PG. It was my 4th time ;) at Ramoji film city. Even though it was the same place again, i enjoyed it along with the people. Anyway i had to spend my weekend somehow ;-) ..

My visit to the AFA

Last Saturday, i had a chance to go to the Air Force Academy,Dundigul about 40 km from Hyderabad for the passing out parade of my friend Shyam. This was one of the wonderful experiences for me. Since this place war quite far from Hyderabad and there are no proper transport to this place i had to reach this place one day earlier on friday night in the Army bus from Secunderabad which was arranged for this occasion specially. The journey took me more than 1 hour and it seemed like a never-ending and reached there the Air Force academy at around 11.30 in the night.
The next morning, i was waiting for the most awaited event, the passing out parade in which nearly 180 air force cadets passed out from various streams. It was around 7.30 in the morning and the crowd which had turned up, mostly the parents and relatives of the cadets , was huge and it was awesome to be part of it. It was even more exciting experience for me because my friend shyam was passing out. He has secured the first position in flying and he is going to be a fighter pilot soon :).
Everything was going according to schedule and there was perfection in timing at all the places. It was an amazing view when the cadets entered marching into the parade ground from behind the podium. The perfection in their marching and timing was amazing. As they take position different air crafts fly past them at the exact time and the coordination was perfect.
When the chief guest arrived another set of air crafts fly past us, as a symbol of salutation.
After this cadets were given away the badges and officially commissioned into air force into different streams like pilot, fighter controller, navigator, ground staff, etc.
The total highlight of the show was the aerobatics performance by the Surya Kiran team. They are one of the finest and highly trained pilot of the Indian Air Force who must have a minimum of 1400+ flying hours to qualify for the team and there are lot of challenges. It was amazing to watch all the stunts which are performed by these pilots in the mid air. There were various formations of the flight along with the trail of the national flag. The coordination among the pilots are perfect and they actions were performed in sync. The planes cross each other head on at mach 2 speed ( about 1000 km/hr ) . It was awesome to see them perform such risky things and a slight mistake can cause a disaster. As the Indian Air force motto says "Touch the sky with glory" , it was really glorious to watch this.
After this there was an exhibition of different types of air crafts like the HPT-32, kiran , choppers like chetak, etc. Its totally a nice experience to see all these crafts with all the sophisticated equipments and controls and had a nice time interacting with the air force people who help in defending our country.

Bookmarks in GDB

When you are debugging a program using gdb you might have come across situations where you might have missed to see what is happening at particular point. But you cant go back to that place in earlier versions of gdb.
With the newer versions of gdb there is a feature called checkpoint in gdb. This is very useful and acts something like a bookmark. This basically takes a whole snapshot of the entire program which you are debugging upto that point including all the variables, files opened, etc. So when you are into a debugging a very big process and finally see that you want to go back to particular place then you can easily go to the saved place.

When you are inside gdb :

checkpoint - creates the checkpoint

restart checkpoint_id - this restores to the saved place.


I also came across one very interesting project is being undertaken by GNU. It aims to reverse a debugging process, i.e, you can go one step back in the debugging. If this feature gets implemented in the future versions of GDB , then it ll be very useful for debugging complex processes and when you realise that you missed out a particular step.
If someone is interested in contributing to this project you can look into : http://sourceware.org/gdb/news/reversible.html