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

Configuring Dual Monitor on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

For the past few days i was trying to configure the external Monitor on my laptop. I am using a Dell Latitude D610 laptop with ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Mobility Radeon X300] graphics card. My external Monitor is Dell 1905FP.

The utility displayconfig-gtk which can be accessed by Sytem->Administration->Screens and Graphics is not working in Ubuntu 7.10. And configuring Dual Monitor on Ubuntu was a painful task for me. Initially i tried with Xinerama for configuring but it didnt help me.

These some of the steps i did to make my dual monitor work :

1. $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

This creates a new xorg.conf file and avoids unnecessary extra lines.

2. Add a Virtual section under the Display subsection of xorg.conf file. So my Screen section looks like this :

Section "Screen"
       Identifier      "Default Screen"
       Device          "ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Mobility Radeon X300]"
       Monitor         "Generic Monitor"
       DefaultDepth    24
       SubSection "Display"
               Modes           "1024x768"
               Virtual         2304    1024
       EndSubSection
EndSection

3. Run the xrandr command to find out the configuration of your Laptop LCD screen and the External monitor.
$ xrandr -q
My Laptop LCD screen is shown as LVDS and the external Monitor is shown as DVI-0. These are the names should be used for configuring.

4. Now run the xrandr command :

$ xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output DVI-0 --auto --left-of LVDS

This makes External Monitor to be my left of the LCD screen. You can also use --right-of , --above , --below to configure according to your need.

In case you get an error like this:

 xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1280x1024 (desired size 2304x1024)

Then change the Virtual section in xorg.conf file to 2304x1024 and restart the X server.

If you need the complete documentation about using xrandr to configure Dual Monitor refer to :
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2

Ubuntu Rocks

Recently shifted to Ubuntu 7.10 on my office laptop from windows. And the performance is really good. I successfully configured Evolution to work with Microsoft Exchange server and the LDAP server. I was very much happy to see my name on the credits section of Evolution, which i worked on a long time back. Sometimes i see that evolution crashes and need to be started again after manually killing the process.
Im basically a Fedora user for long time and the configurations are little different in Ubuntu. But the apt-get command is very much useful. I need not search for all the rpm files and the dependencies.
Configuring pidgin in office was another big trouble, as the gtalk and yahoo messengers traffic were routed through a different server.
Im still having lots of problems in configuring dual monitors on Ubuntu.

The Spam game

How many times have you come across this in your mail as forwards ??

There are 3.22 millions of Indians in USA (15% of population) . YET,
38% of doctors in USA are Indians.
12% scientists in USA are Indians.
36% of NASA scientists are Indians.
34% of Microsoft employees are Indians.
28% of IBM employees are Indians.
17% of INTEL scientists are Indians.
13% of XEROX employees are! Indians.

This is a spam mail which is floating in the internet for quite a long time. There are no solid evidence for these data which is getting passed on. And now the spam as even convinced our Indian Government about the data which is presented.

Our ministry of state for HRD, presented the same data in Rajya Sabha in defense of the Indians and our achievement.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/36_of_scientists_at_NASA_are_Indians_Govt_survey/articleshow/2853178.cms
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/India_rising_in_US_Govt_falls_victim_to_net_hoax/articleshow/2856295.cms

It is the responsibility of the government to validate any information which is being published. How careless are they ?? And these poor politicians are to be blamed for all these.

War of the Web | Google Microsoft Adobe Mozilla

There is always a constant fight between the technologies to conquer the web. Sometime back it was Google with the use of AJAX revolutionized the user experience in the web. The user experience and navigations are made very simple using javascript and XML in its products like Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Picassa, etc. Now All the office applications are available on the web which makes it easy to access your data from anywhere in the world.



Later Microsoft also jumped into this with its own Microsoft Office Live Workspace which also offers the same kind of office functionalities on the net as against Google offered earlier. Microsoft Office Live is still in its beta and the access to it is restricted to very limited users. Read the review here .
Microsoft has also come out with its latest Silverlight which is a cross-browser, cross-platform plugin which is based on .Net and promises to give you rich media experience over the internet. Click here to see a small mashup application using Google maps and Silverlight.

Recently Adobe has introduced Adobe AIR( Adobe Integrated Runtime) which lets developers to create rich internet applications and lets you run it as a desktop application on various operating systems. It lets developers to develop application using AJAX, Flash and Flex.
With all these developments Adobe has acquired a startup company called Virtual Ubiquity , which has a product called Buzzword. Buzzword is an office application which is totally developed using Flash and Flex offers awesome user experience. The navigations are very smooth appearance looks very cool. Buzzword is in its beta and we can expect a lot of features to be added soon. Try out Buzzword.

Mozilla foundation also has announced its new project called Prism, which helps you to run the web applications as standalone desktop application. It works as a plug-in to the Firefox browser and let you access the web application just from the start-menu just like another application. I tried out the prototype which was released by mozilla foundation. It is really cool application which allows the applications like gmail, Google calendar,etc to run like desktop application.

With more and more applications getting on to the web, there wont be a need for a computer to access all your information. You just need a browser which will support the web application which you can even access it from your mobile phone. A very light-weight client with the access to the internet is very much sufficient to do most of your work. So all the big players are competing to capture this growing market and monetize on it.

Jumpcut : An online video editor from Yahoo

Just came across this cool new online tool for editing all your videos. When Google has an array of products on its list, Yahoo also has many such products which i was not aware. And Jumpcut is from Yahoo which was acquired recently by yahoo. Even though Google has Youtube for the online video sharing, it does not have the feature to edit any video. But Jumpcut offers you a lot of options.
These are some of the things which i was able to explore on jumpcut:

• Upload all you video just like you do on youtube.
• Share the videos with friends or make it public
• Make a movie of you own by combining many small clips as you do in a video editor
• Add sounds, animations, text in the video.
• Amazingly all these things you are able to do online and its very fast.
  

BarCamp | BarCampHyderabad5 [ BCH5 ]

Its my first experience at a BarCamp and i was most fascinated to attend this because it was hosted at the Google campus in Hyderabad. I have heard a lot about other BarCamps in bangalore and even about the latest DevCamp in bangalore which was attended by my friends varalu and paramesh.

I finally managed to make it to the Google's campus at 10.30AM accompanied by one of friend Dhuree. I was surprised to see the overwhelming number of people who have gathered over there. I could see many people coming up who have not registered at the wiki.

After all the initial registration and stuff got over we were led to the Google's massive cafeteria where the presentations were going on. From then on there were a series of talks going on by lots of enthusiastic speakers. These are some of the presentations which are worth a mention

• Open Source Development Model by Saifi Khan from http://www.twincling.org/ - This session was too good. I enjoyed this session very much and got a lot of eye openers on the open source development model. It was very much inspiring and the speaker was able to influence the audience very well. He is part of a society called TWINCLING, which basically promotes Open source software in Andra Pradesh and parts of Maharashtra.
  
• How to Build a Successful Blog by Amit Agarwal. - The speaker is a full-time blogger and makes his living by blogging. He gave very good ideas and tips for blogging and do s and donts. This session was very good and he gave many of his personal experiences with blogging.
• Lighting up the Web with Silverlight 2 by Janakiram from Microsoft. Like a typical Microsoft campaign, this person was able to capture the attention of the audience very well. The session was very good with many demos like a mini media player on the web which can run multiple movies simultaneously with HD quality. A small demo about Moonlight, a mono based implementation of Silverlight and a mash-up application built over this.
  
• Building Low Cost Scalable Web Applications by Ramesh Rajamani. Even though this session was little bit slow and very much prolonged , i was able to grab some ideas about building a good web application.
• Ruby on Rails relevance to Startup's, Sumanth Krishna. This session must have been named as Ruby on Rails tutorial and the speaker was not sticking onto the topic properly.
• Behavior Driven Development using RSpec, Sanjeev Kumar.

And i missed some of the presentations because of the parallel track which was going on for sometime.

• Women in IT and Entrepreneurship by Kavita Vemuri
• The BrainWave Application Development Platform
  
• http://atuitu.com/ a social networking website for telugu people
• http://www.corners.in/ Web2.0 Content centered networking for Indians worldwide

And generally, we had a very good support from Google and the place was too good which had lot of ambiance, multi-point projectors, relay telecast on TVs. We had lot of support from Google employees. A special mention to the food at Google( It was excellent).
Some of the bad things which i was able to observe was there was very less participation from audience and many were roaming and disturbing the speaker sometimes. I was able to see the worst of things when the T-shirts were distributed. It was a complete mess around that place and the google folks were struggling to control the crowd. And many managed to get away with 2 or even 3 T-shirts.

I atleast expect some better way of organizing these things in the next BarCamp and also speakers should try to stick on to the topic and not to deviate from it.

PS: More Photos to be added soon. Guys if you get some photos please send me.

Bajajs new Cheapest Bike for Rs.1000 ( The competitor for Nano )

Google OS 2.0

There has been talks for long time that Google is secretly developing an OS of its own. If you think that i am going to talk about that OS, then you are wrong. This is about a OS developed by a startup company called Good OS. This is basically a distribution derived from Ubuntu and lots of cool new features it boasts of. It has an eye-candy look because of its desktop which is based on Enlightenment . And the main reason behind the name "gOS" or sometimes called as Google OS is because of its integration with Google and lot of web application.

Recently they have released the Google OS 2.0 "Rocket" which has lot of new feature that integrates so well with Google applications and may be thats the reason behind the name. "Rocket" is packed with Google Gears, new online offline synchronization technology from Google that enables offline use of web apps; gBooth, a browser-based web cam application with special effects, integration with Facebook and other web services; shortcuts to launch Google Reader, Talk, and Finance on the desktop; an online storage drive powered by Box.net; and Virtual Desktops, an intuitive feature to easily group and move applications across multiple desktop spaces

For more details:
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/news/linux/15642/linux-based-gos-2-0-will-debut-monday

Celebrating my first year anniversary

Exactly on this very day, one year back i had this surgery done on me for fixing my hand. All that starts as a fun can end up into something miserable with time. This is one such incident in my life.

Date 17/12/2006 :
The previous day night Lokesh came to me and asked me for a trip to Munnar, that too at 11pm in the night. So i agreed to the trip , which is supposed to be a road trip from our college in coimbatore to Munnar in Kerala ( a 4.5 hour drive from coimbatore). I got up at early morning 4 and got ready for the wonderful ride which is waiting for me. We started our journey from my friends house at around 6am. Since this was not a well planned event, i didn't even had time to inform many people (mainly parents) about the trip, which turned out to be a bad idea later.

It was a clear morning and the weather was perfect for the trip. We took some little bit of snacks and water bottles started our cruise with the pulsars. We reach Munnar in about 4.5 hours. It is a wonderful place which was fully covered with tea estates and lush greenery. That day was full of sight seeing activities and some boating in a nearby lake. And also went to the peak of the hills which was the most enjoyable experience.

Date 18/12/2006:
The next day was a fine day and a fine morning. All were tired from the previous days activities and we managed to get up only late and we got ready for the sight seeing. We went to a falls which was nearby and then to the suicide point. After lunch we planned for the descend from the mountains hoping to reach coimbatore by 5PM. So as usual we started our bikes and started descending the mountains. The roads were very curvy and the slopes were too much in the mountains. Everything was going fine and we almost traveled half the way down the mountains.

It was around 2.30 in the afternoon. Little did we realize that we were traveling bit faster due to the slopes in the mountains. Then suddenly came a sharp turning, and we were not able to maintain the balance of the bike. We somehow tried to control it , but it was out of our control. The next second myself and lokesh both were lying on the road. We were unable to realize what had happened to us. The bike was on one side of the road and we were lying in the middle of road. Its good that no other vehicle passed by that time.

It took me few seconds to realize that i am lying on the road and lokesh at a little distance from me. Somehow i got up and went to the safer side of the road. Only then i realized that something was wrong with my hand. I was not able to fold it easily. I just thought it would be a sprain or swelling due to the fall. Then somebody was shouting and yelling like anything as if he has lost his life. It was none other than lokesh. I could see the fear in his face. Everybody was little confused and don't know what to do. Suddenly Vamsi and Srinivas came to rescue. Srinivas brings the spray from somewhere and applies it on my hand. Mohan and Sandeep made lokesh to settle down.

Then only Vamsi slowly told me that it could be a fracture by seeing the swelling on my hand and the mysterious shape of it. I was very much shocked by hearing that. And Srinivas brings his sweater and ties it around my neck and made my hand to rest properly. I was even more frightened by seeing the reactions of lokesh at that particular moment. Then i felt a little bit of giddiness mainly because of my fear. Vamsi brought some water and made me sit properly.

Now starts our real adventure and series of events that i could never forget in my life. Vamsi slowly came near me and asked whether i am ok. I said yes , still feeling my giddiness. Then two local villagers who happened to pass by that way , told us there was a small clinic nearby. So Vamsi told me to sit on his bike. I somehow managed to get on the bike and i was holding him tightly, so that i wont fall from the bike. So we start first. And lokesh was taken care by srinivas and sandeep. So we came to a nearby clinic. But i was terribly disappointed when there was no doctor available. There was only a lady, who was supposed to be a pharmacist. Not knowing what to do, she just gave me a tablet of pain killer and advised us to go to the doctor in Munnar. But already we were half the way down and going back would take more than 2 hours. Then we started to move from that place expecting to meet someone. To my surprise Lokesh , srinivas , Mohan and Sandeep had managed to find out a doctor who was on leave and in his house. So i was taken there. By seeing my hand he told me , it was a fracture and he told even more shocking things. "It could be a multiple fracture also" said the doctor. I was taken aback. He adviced us to go to either Munnar or to Udumalpet for the treatment.

Then started my worst of the fears. I have not even informed my parents about the trip and i didn't know what to do. Then someone gave me some stupid ideas and all. But finally we decided to go to Coimbatore before the evening. So i got on to the bike while Vamsi was driving it. They made arrangements so that my hand was properly protected from the jerks of the bike. And Vamsi managed to drive the bike at a dead slow speed so that the jerks didn't disturb my hand. From time to time we stopped to synchronize our bikes and spray the pain killer spray on my hand. Within 2 hours my hand had swollen like anything and the pain was increasing a bit. But finally we managed to reach the coimbatore by around 7.30 in the evening. We get to Ganga hospital and the doctor told me to take an X-ray. Taking an X-ray was the most painful thing , that too with the broken hand. And i was getting irritated with that lab attendant. After the X-ray the doctor said that its was a single fracture and it had to be operated. Not knowing what to do i called my father. With little bit of anger, frustration and care my father told me to do the first-aid and come to my house, so that i can take treatment in CMC, Vellore. After getting my first-aid and plaster of Paris on my hand , i caught the next train along with lokesh accompanying me.


Date 19/12/2006 :
The next morning , we visited the doctor and he said that a surgery had to be done and a plate had to be fixed in my hand. So i get admitted the same day and got operated the next day. The surgery was another gruesome experience. Even though they gave me sedatives during the surgery , i woke up in the middle of the surgery. I could clearly hear the sound of drilling that is being done to my hand and doctors were talking in some technical terms. Again i went back to sleep and lost consciousness. After the surgery i had to stay in the hospital for a day and then got discharged.
The recovery from this was another terrible experience. I had to do physiotherapy regularly in order to use my hand properly. It took nearly 1.5 months for me to use the hand as usual. Even the folding of hands would be difficult and caused lot of pain to me.
The accident gave me lot of experiences in life and memories which i ll not forget for life. It was my first accident and a fracture. But in a way, i am happy that i escaped with just a fracture and nothing seriously happened. And something which starts as a fun can lead to something terrible in life, which we may not realize at the time of enjoyment.

World without women

A blog from me after really long time and lots of pestering from varalu :) so thought of writing about a social topic.

Recently came across an article somewhere about this topic. So just thought of writing about it. Imagine a world without women. What would happen ....

This is what is happening in come parts of our country. There are lots of villages where there are no girls for the men in the village. The basic reason behind this is the sex selection and the gender bias towards getting male child. These things are still happening in some villages in our country.

There have been lot of incidents in the state of UP especially. These are the after effects of events that happened in the 80's and the 90's. Families preferred only male child and they killed the female infants. Also with the advancement of technologies sex determination using techniques like scanning led to selective abortion of pregnancy. So what are the consequences of this...

Men are buying women from nearby villages and states for marrying. Usually the parents of the boy used to get the dowry in olden days. Now its the reverse. The parents of the boy pay to the girl's parents for marriage. That much is the demand for girls.
The wealthier families in the village are able to buy girls from neighboring village or states. Some families even get girls from as far as Punjab. So what happens in case of a poor family. There are cases where a single girl is being shared by all the men in the family and reports of rape and murder associated with these. And the violence against women in these parts of the country are increasing day by day.

This is not the case in India alone. Even china is facing such a crisis these days. China introduced the scheme of one child per family some years back. Because of this the sex ratio in the country is somewhat bad. It seems that there are 20 percent more boys than girls in the country.

So where does this lead to ?? it creates an imbalance in the population ,the crime rates go up , and violence against women increase like anything.

There might come one day when parents want only girl child and start avoiding male child.

Anatomy of a Search Engine

Here is the paper published by Sergey Brin and Larry Page about the architecture of the Google Search engine and various other technologies they hav used like Page ranking,etc ...


http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Why Java is Slow ?

Came across a very good article on why Java is slower. For a long time i used to wonder why java is very much slower than other languages. Can java be ever faster than c++ ? There are various issues to be concerned.
here is a good article which tells about all the drawbacks of java language .

http://www.jelovic.com/articles/why_java_is_slow.htm

a visit to the world of 'Evolution'

Long time since i have blogged. Today spent a lot of time surfing the net and coming across various new things. After a loooooong time i had been to the Evolution site to see the changes going on there. Atlast they have commited my patch. The patch had been previously approved by NotZed. But noone had taken care to commit it , after NotZed has left evolution. I had been to the bugzilla.gnome.org and found both my patches commited to the Head by Sreenivasa Ragavan(srag). At last they hav included it in the ChangeLog also.

http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/evolution/filter/ChangeLog

Here are some of the interesting blogs which i found out while surfing :
http://basicsuncovered.blogspot.com/
http://smartypeeps.blogspot.com
http://cplusplusgems.blogspot.com/

Photos at Porthy Mund

Im posting some of the photos which we took during the trekking at Porthi Mund




A view from the bus ... The ghat roads which led to the lake...










Can u spot something there ???
Look closely... Can u see the moon ???
This photo was taken at 10.30 in the morning
how amazing ???
























Myself along with varalu , raga, varun , paramesh from left to right..















































The place where the trekking started ... the road which lead the beautiful porthi mund dam



























Myself near the lake












The path which we took into the deep woods ...


























Myself , varalu , paramesh , varun , along the way with our sticks in hand....




























The places where we had to creep into the bushes... In some places we had to go like this for about 100 metres...










Myself along the shores of the Porthy Mund lake













People who started pelting stones at the waters.. Then it turned out to be a game which we all enjoyed ...













A group photo along with Kannan












Myself holding to a stick , which we used for the trekking ....













See the crystal clear waters of the porthy mund lake.. The exotic untouched part of nilgiris ..











The wild forest ....











My friends along with Kannan
















A rare photo which captures the sun on the camera.. It shows the scenic beauty of the Pothimund Lake











The forest security guards who accompanied us through our trip and answered all our stupid questions patiently...
These guys have caught many poachers , Ganja Planters and illegal intruders ..







The way that leads to the porthi mund lake ...
A path where only man can walk through ....

Trekking

Yesterday had been a wonderful day as i was part of the trekking which was organised by the CAP and Nature Club of the College. The whole trip was fun filled and exotic one. We had been to place called "Pothi Mand" which is in the interior forests of Nilgiris range. It is a one and a half hour journey from Ooty.

We started the journey at 6.30 with bus( PSG bus) full of guys from various departments. Then proceeded to Ooty and then the "Pothy Mand" , which is a restricted forest area known only to few people. People say that it is the Maniratnam's favorite spot and been in movies like Roja and Alaipayuthae. We started the trekking at around 1 in the afternoon. The place was exotic location untouched by common people. It was wonderful to see such a place where no pollution has peeped in. The air was fresh and the climate cool and no words to explain the happiness which i got after seeing those places..

It was a dense forest totally covered with the trees everywhere , and we had to go in places where only there was way for a man to go. It was nice to have an adventurous journey inside those dense forest area. First we went to the Pothi Mand Water Reservoir , which was an amazing dam with very steep walls and the amount of water it was holding was tremendous. As crossed it we entered the jungle.. From there we had to go in to the deep forest which was a 4 km walk. It was an adventerous walk all the way , with streams of water gushing along the way and a mini water fall in the way. From there we reached a place they call it as "hut".. Took rest there for sometime. Then we proceeded to the lake which the Pothi Mand Dam preserves. The lake was an exotic location like which i have seen only in Discovery and NGC . I wondered such a place existed in India. Why should we go for Hawaaiian islands when we have such places here itself..

The we had to return back. We all were totally exhausted during our return from the place. It was very cold and dark as it was nearing 5 o clock. The chillness was extreme and the jungle full of noices from the insects.. When we were returning from the Dam we had a wonderful scene of a herd of Bisons, around 20 to 30 on the way. It was nice to see such animals at the night time. Atlast we have seen some animals in the forest.
It was around 12 when we reached the Hostel. We all were totally exhausted , no energy. Had a good night's sleep..