Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

Sri Raghavendra Swamy Mutt publishes and distributes panchangas for every new telugu calender. You have to register with them over the phone. The Mutt will send a copy in either Sanskrit, Kannada or Telugu. For the benefit of people who live abroad, or who prefer to have panchanga available on their computer or phones, They also make it available on the web site. There is also an andriod app (apk) for the same. You can download them here .  A copy of Telugu Panchagam is saved here .

బంధు మిత్రులకి, సమస్త లోక జనులందరికి  శ్రీ నందన నామ సంవత్సర  శుభాకాంక్షలు సర్వే జనా సుఖినోభవంతు   Wishing everyone in the family,  all our friends  and everyone everywhere.. Happy Ugadi photo credit: kalyan

Today is Engineer's Day in India . Happy Engineers Day..

Archana.. Amulya..

  India won the 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup, beating a formidable Srilankan team by 6 wickets. It was a tribute to Indian cricket, 1.2 billion Indians and a particular one of them, Sachin Tendulkar. Sachin adds this feather to his celebrated cap after waiting 5 world cups.

  ‘Million March' turns violent in Hyderabad Why is this happening to us? We used to pride ourselves for hosting ravindranath tagore (never thinking he is not from our state/region). We put *Cotton Dora*'s idol in our land (never considering he is not even from our country). Such were we, that MK Gandhi praised our patriotism and hospitality. It is a shame some of the most educated are have a positive side to this story. Supporting these acts of immaturity and haste in the name of a Greater cause, is disrespecting the genuine-ty of that demand, belittling the cause.  There was time when we did things differently. A different leadership, and people who really followed them religiously. The Video is a reflection of what we achieved, and how we achieved- A path is respected by the world and the humanity. The students who lost their lives never would have done it, if it were under the same path.  The people DO deserve thier voice to be heard. But they DONOT have a ...

How much do we know about the places in grand mother's stories from the epics? Here is a map that covers most information. Wiki each region for more information on history, stories, and fables.

There was a time when this was joked about at lines outside US consulate in Chennai. Times really DO change. What will this mean to you?

And Back to work on Monday. The US is just as it was when I left. Missing India already. But very excited to start work tomorrow. The journey was very tiring. In the last 6 years, this is the first time I felt so, after flying to or from US. Probably this accounts to the old flights on British Airways. Note to self: Next time, avoid BA. Old flights, Bad Entertainment system (worst among all airlines so far), Psuedo-Friendly Staff and Customer service. However, Food was exceptional. Overall - Not worth it. Go Qatar (for its Service, Newer aircrafts) or Air India (For Food, Newer aircrafts).

Don't buy those water bottles again. Bobbles – is a pet bottle that can be your very own personal water filter – on the GO!! It filters out chlorine and other contaminants as you drink. The filter , replaceable, lasts for about 300 bottles. Does the job for about two months. The filters are available separately. The Bobble is also a good idea environmentally speaking. As the Bobble website notes, 1.5 million barrels of oil are used annually to make plastic water bottles, most of which are then casually discarded. We had been buying bottled water. Looks like now we'll be drinking from our Bobbles. (This trip to India this time lasted 6 months. I wish I came to know about this before. I would have saved so many water bottles)

Just back from Vinukonda, AP, India . This trip to India is taking a toll. I am moving around a lot of places and very quickly. Its a lot different from travelling in US. We have a lot more tools and *own* or rental cars. In India you typically travel in public transport (rail or road) - Not many places you want to go can be reached by flight directly. So you generally donot need directions. But once I had to travel on personal car. There are very few GPSes, let alone - their reliability. However, Google now does come handy. It not only shows directions from one city/town. But is also helpful in taking directions in Cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai. The text directions may not be really as good as the *helpful* bystander - but the directions will definitely give a better picture.

One of my ISPs (the all reliable) BSNL is slow again. This time to non indian servers. All indian servers are fast. The CDN balanced Gmail, Yahoo (and speedtest.net) are pretty fast. Twitter seemed slow. My servers on east cost (USA), aws boxes (east-1), and infoq dowload site are snail paced. This looks something in the lines od UnderWaterSeaCable cut a few days ago.   Here is my recorded information from speedtest.net is outlined below.   Time IP Download Upload Latency Location Distance 4/26/2010 5:24 PM GMT 117.195.198.xxx 1.19 Mb/s 0.64 Mb/s 128 ms Mumbai 400 4/26/2010 5:44 PM GMT 117.195.198.xxx 1.68 Mb/s 0.71 Mb/s 92 ms New Delhi 800 4/26/2010 5:53 PM GMT 117.195.198.xxx 0.14 Mb/s 0.59 Mb/s 291 ms Bangkok 15...

Just less than 2 weeks from the news of venture with Google , Airtel and BSNL have released new Faster internet plans.

Day 2 missed James. But the tech series remained just as educating as Day1's. I dug deep into the JEE6 foundation laid by Yesterday's  sessions. Today: I Jugged in knoweldge from Java Persistence API 2 Overview of Servlet 3.0 ZFS (a Whole lot on ) Context and Dependency Injection in JavaEE 6 Java EE 6 Tools Show: NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ I have to bold all of them, but the ZFS really instigated me to push OpenSolaris into my dev space. Look forward to some OpenSolaris entries coming.

Finally, I been to Sun Techdays – here in Hyderabad. Now I can say.. "Been there".. done that!.. But it was an amazing experience, with more than 1500 people in HICC, Novatel, Hyderabad. Best of all, I was able to see James Gosling. Live. In Person. They were very exhaustively educating 9 hrs. Although I was keen on Enterprise Track, I was able to sneak some time in JavaFX and Solaris Technologies too. I stuck myself in: Java EE 6 & GlassFish v3: Paving the path for the future. Designing and Implementing Secure RESTful Web Services. Hands On Lab: Build End-to-End RIA Applications Using JavaFX, Dojo, REST, JPA, and MySQL. Glassfish and JEE 6 Features (Stall at the exhibition). OpenSolaris Installation desk (Okay, I got OpenSolaris on  my vbox). Enterprise Java Persistence with Oracle TopLink. OSGi & Java EE in GlassFish. I loved ArunGupta 's talks about Glassfish. Especially, the OSGi one. Overall, its was a fascinating experience. I will loo...

Reliance is a big name in Indian Telecom sector. And they better hire some production support professionals, because I am looking at this for the past 25 mins. Still the same thing. This is just the kind of messages you don't want your production users to see. It exposes a lot of technical details.Something you, as a developer, don't want to expose to outside world.

Indian government is bent on a  hazardous called the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage, and it's coming up for a vote in a couple of days. The bill lets U.S. corporations off the hook for any nuclear accidents they cause on Indian soil. They'd only have to pay a meager amount, and Indian taxpayers would be stuck paying crores for the nuclear clean up and to compensate the victims. There is a lot of dissent in the blogosphere and the Indian press about this. However, It is unclear why the ruling UPA Govt seeks to bring this to the table. Greenpeace is launching a petition asking the PM to hold a public consultation before introducing the bill. http://www.greenpeace.org/india/stop-the-vote You can also voice out on facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Petition-against-Civil-Liability-for-Nuclear-Damage-Bill-in-India/384059698828 Do your bit, Google it and voice your opinion.

A few weeks back I wrote a comparison on prices for internet in India and the USA. Well, A lot is about to change. According to CNet news , a 7.68Tbps line is due soon to Asia. Bharati Airtel (one of the largest telecom companies in India) is part of the Unity Consortium which is making this happen. According to the story, The Unity Consortium, which consists of Google, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel, has nearly completed the testing of the $300 million project. Internet users in Asia will start seeing faster Internet speeds over the next several months from the new cable, which has the potential to create a 7.68Tbps (terabits per second) connection under the Pacific. This could mean a lot of change in dynamics and economics of internet traffic. With already (considerably) low prices in India (thanks to a tough competition among BSNL, Reliance, Airtel and Tata), The only complaint was the speeds of unlimited plans. A limit-less user, generally capped by a...

Hyderabad's Bsnl selfcare website [http://selfcare.sdc.bsnl.co.in/selfcare] reported has some trojan/malware. At first I thought it was only on my comupter. But looks like its happenning on most other computers. Even if coming from GOOGLE.       Do you notice this too? Comment here.

"Mapquesting" in India is uncommon, if ever used at all. Google India maps have been developing quiet fast in the past few years. The last time I went to India, I was able to spot my home. Then I was able to save it as a favorite location. But Yesterday, I used it for real. I had to locate US consulate in Hyderabad. I had a Consular Interview scheduled on 18th for My H1B visa Extension. I did not have time to go personally there a day before, which I would have done otherwise. I looked up the address from the Consulate website . And put that in maps.Google.co.in . This dint come up, but – I did a search for us consulate, Hyderabad , and voila, I got the exact address I was looking for! Cool isn't it? Then, I hit the directions link, and put my home address. Dint come up. Tried with the local area name instead of the exact address. And Swweet sugar, It was even able to get turn by turn directions for me. View Larger Map