The first thing that I wanted to try was to revive my old application. The application has been inactive because it has surpassed the total stored data quota and I never managed to find time to revive it.

One of the biggest issues that I mentioned last time, was the ability to not be able to delete data from the application easily. There is an upper limit of 1GB on the total stored data. Considering that the data is schema-less (which means that you need more space to store the same data when compared to Relational Databases), this upper limit is severely restrictive when compared to the other quota limits that are imposed. There were about 800,000 entries of a single kind (equivalent of tables) that I had to delete!

So I started looking for ways to delete all the data available and came across this post. I decided to go with the approach mentioned here. The approach still seems to be to delete data in chunks and there is no simple way out. The maximum number of entries allowed in a fetch call is 500, which means I require 1600 calls to delete all the data.

Anyway, so I wrote a simple script as mentioned in the post above and executed it. I experimented with various chunk values and saw that 300 was the size that worked optimally; anything more either seemed to take a lot of time or actually timed out.

Here is the code that I executed:


from google.appengine.ext import db
from <store> import <kind>


def delete_all():
   i = 0
   while True:
      db.delete(<kind>.all().fetch(300))
   i = i + 1
   print i


saved this file as purger.py and executed it as:

$ python appengine_console.py twitter-trending-topics
App Engine interactive console for twitter-trending-topics
>>> import purger
>>> purger.delete_all()


A seemingly simple script, but after about a couple of hours of execution (after having deleted roughly 200,000 entries), I started seeing a 503 Service Unavailable exception. I thought this was to do with some network issues, but realized soon that this was not the case. I had run out of my CPU time quota!

To delete 200,000 entries the engine had taken up 6.5 CPU hours and this it managed to do in less than 2 hours! It had, according to the graphs, assigned 4 CPU cores to the task and executed my task in the 2 hours. At this rate, it will take me 4 days to just delete the data from my application. The Datastore CPU time quota is 62.11 hours but there is an upper cap of 6.5 hours on Total CPU time quota – the Datastore CPU Time quota is not considered separate. I am not sure how this works!

As seen in the screenshot above, the script executed for about 2 hours before running out of CPU. There was no other appreciable CPU usage in the last 24 hours. Considering that there was no other task taking up CPU, the 6.42 hours of Datastore CPU time seems to be included in the 6.5 hours of Total CPU time. So how am I supposed to utilize the rest of the 55 hours of Datastore CPU time?

I am not sure if I am doing something wrong but considering that there are no better ways of doing things here are my observations:

• It is easy to get data into the system
• It is not easy to query the data (there is an upper limit of 500 and considering that joins are done in code, this is severely restrictive).
• There is a total storage limit of 1GB for the free account
• It is not easy to purge entities – the simplest way to delete data is to delete them in chunks
• Deleting data is highly CPU intensive – and you can run out of CPU quota fairly quickly.

So what kind of applications can we build that is neither IO intensive nor CPU intensive? What is Google’s strategy here? Am I missing something? Is anything wrong with my analysis?

When I bought the Sony Reader (PRS600BC), I didn’t put much thought into it. I compared it only to the other well-known reader at the time – the Amazon Kindle – and decided without doubt that I am going for the Sony reader. Frankly, I didn’t research for other options and I wasn’t even aware of the other readers in the market.

So if you ask me, how does this compare to, say the Nook, or other digital readers in India that use e-ink or the tons of other Chinese digital readers that can be hacked, I don’t have an answer. What I can do tell you is why I made this choice and what I feel after having used it for a couple of months.

So let’s begin with the choice:
Between the Sony readers and the Kindle, the choice for me was obvious. Even if the Kindle was dirt cheap and had better look and feel and amazing features, I would still go with the Sony reader at this point in time, for the simple reason that the Sony reader supports EPUB, and the Kindle does not (read the disclaimer below). As the DRM debates are on, I felt that the Amazon Kindle does not have EPUB support and I was not sure what documents would work without issues on the Kindle and what would not. It made no sense to me to have to pay Amazon (howerver few a cents) or let Amazon decide what is and what isn’t appropriate to upload into the Kindle (read disclaimer below). On the other hand, the Sony reader has no such reservations – connect the reader, allow the device to mount, drag and drop your documents and you will be reading your book on the reader in less than a minute.

Now, when I talk about open formats, people automatically assume that it means I can copy pirated versions of books into the reader and that’s the reason why the Sony reader is favored, but I think the reason is slightly different. Let us look at it in a little more detail.

Here is the definition of open format from openformats.org:
We will say that a file format is open if the mode of presentation of its data is transparent and/or its specification is publicly available.

Why is it so important?
Well, the fact that the reader supports open formats means that I can think of tons of uses for my reader. I can use it not only to read my books, but I can also create documents in the format that it supports and then upload them into the reader. What the document is – is totally up to me to decide.

For example, suppose I find an interesting website/blog which has some content that I intend to read on my reader, I can just fetch the website contents using wget, and then use html2epub to convert them into an EPUB document and upload it to my reader in minutes. Is it as simple in a Kindle? How is the support in Linux? I was not sure.

You may now say, “But that’s for geeks; how about the non-geeks? How do they benefit by going with the Sony reader?”. This is where tools like Calibre come into picture. Calibre provides an easy interface for users to sync their documents and news feeds with the reader. It also has the feature of syncing Google Reader content with your reader. All this is possible, because of one decision that Sony made – to support open formats.

So for me, the decision was simple – if the reader does not support open formats I would not go with it.

Enough of the comparison, so what should I expect in a reader?
A reader is an equivalent of a book. It is designed to as closely match a real book as possible. So expect any feature that you would have in a regular book and you wouldn’t be disappointed. Note taking, ability to bookmark pages etc are natural to expect in a reader. If your expectations however are closer to that of a cell phone and you say, “Does this play movies? Does it record video?”, my only answer is, “Cummon guys, it’s a reader!” Of course, there are certain things that you could expect in a e-reader, for eg: bluetooth that allows a simple sync of documents. The reader has the ability to play music (or I would say play audio-books), and also display photos, but I am not a big fan of it – I always believe in buying a device which does one thing well – the reader is meant to do everything with e-books, and do it well.

So now to the actual features and what I liked and what I disliked:

The pros:

• Boots in less than a second and takes you back to where you left – the Sony reader remembers where you stopped reading a book and takes you to the same page the next time you open the book.
• The touch screen is cool and extremely useful – the coolest use of this is I can double-tap on any word and its meaning appears in the bottom of the screen. I am so used to this feature now that I sometimes find myself tapping a word in an actual book and expecting its meaning to appear in the bottom! (I am not kidding). Another use of this is to take notes – just bring up the note taking feature and just select the words using the stylus. You can even use the draw mode to circle words and then write your note next to it! Double-tap the right corner of the screen and it bookmarks the page.
• The battery backup is amazing – I am not sure how many times I have charged the reader in the last 2 months, but I can tell you its not a whole lot.
• The reader is able to render PDFs with images and size does not seem to be an issue – I have tried uploading PDFs of 150MB and more and the reader effortlessly rendered it.
• The reader auto-flows documents at various zoom sizes – once you get comfortable at a certain font size, you can ensure that every document you read is of the same font size so that you can read documents extremely fast.
• Enough space – with 512MB of memory, the reader has sufficient space to store tons of books. But if you think you are short of space, you have the option of popping in a SD card. I am yet to find the need to do that.

The cons:

• The contrast could have been better – a common complaint with Sony readers. The e-ink technology seems to increase the contrast with light so the contrast is a problem in low light.
• The glare – another common complaint with Sony readers – the touch screen creates a glare and so can hurt your eyes if not held the right way. It took me some time to get used to this but I don’t see it as a problem now.
• No backlight – this is a problem which has been solved in the next version of the reader, Sony Digital Reader – PRS700BC, but the PRS 600 BC does not have a backlight making it tough to read books in low light.
• The touch screen makes the reader look like a page behind a glass – making it look unnatural.
• The music player seems to suck up a lot of power.
• Software bugs: Considering that it has been only 2 months since I bought the reader, I have run into quite a few bugs already. Here are a few:
  1. The most disturbing one of all is the reader seems to reboot when it runs into an issue in some EPUB documents. Sometimes it just hangs and you need to hard-reset the reader and a couple of times even do a catastrophic failure recovery. I am not sure if the issue is with the reader or the document converter, but I would expect the reader to not fail horribly in any case.
  2. The dictionary does not work on some words and there is no way to look up some word in the dictionary except to tap on some other word, bring up the dictionary and then change the word. I think the Sony reader requires more usability tests.
  3. Tapping on a word in the dictionary should take me to the meaning of that word – many a times I find myself not knowing the meaning of some word in the meaning provided. And the only way for me to look this up is to remove the current word and look up the new word manually.
  4. The note format is confusing – the notes are stored as XML documents, but the format that is used to identify the words is confusing. I was not able to decode it.
  5. Usability issues with images in documents: The reader is excellent for reading novels but falls a little short of expectations when it comes to reading research papers with images and equations in them. The reader does render the document pretty well, but I have seen cases where images are not rendered or it is difficult to read. There is a zoom feature which allows you to zoom into documents and then drag the document around but this is quite unusable because of the delay in rendering.

All in all, I would say, Sony has made an excellent effort at building an e-reader. It would take another couple of releases before we can expect it to mature, but I would say I am pretty content with what it already has and I don’t mind waiting a couple of years before upgrading.

Disclaimer: A few of these words may already be outdated considering that Kindle may support drag and drop of documents and have some form of ePub support (or a official converter) soon. Further, the DRM debates are still on, discussing trade-offs between piracy and usability.

I reached the place around 5pm and had expected it to be the right time. It was quite sunny and hot until 6pm and I was not able to get good snaps as I was directly facing the sun. It was a clear bluish sky and I couldn’t see any interesting patterns in the sky. I was disappointed. There were hoards of pigeons near the entrance and it was quite a sight to see them fly but I didn’t manage to get a sharp snap of a pigeon in flight.

I waited until the sun descended behind the buildings and then managed to get a few snaps of the sunset with the reflection in the water.

One of the other reasons to go to Sankey Tank in the evening was to check out the musical fountain which was a recent addition to Sankey Tank. I was all prepared and I had taken my tripod with me. The show started around 7pm.

Although it wasn’t as good as I had expected it to be, I managed to get a few long exposures of the fountain and returned back content.

I had never visited the Lalbagh lake side after I bought my SLR so, since we didn’t have any major plans for this weekend, I thought I will see what I can get spending an evening beside the lake in Lalbagh. I wasn’t disappointed.

I started off with my wide angle clicking snaps of the trees. The sizes of some of these trees amazed me – huge would be an understatement. They seemed easily a 100 years old if not more. I felt bad considering that the government could be reckless in allowing the Metro Rail Corporation to acquire parts of Lalbagh and cut down trees in the name of development.

Anyway, politics apart, I continued along the walking path. Most benches were taken by couples and there were a few people walking/running along the path. There were a few feeding whatever they could to the ducks in the lake and a few others returning with boxes of grapes from the ‘Drakshi Mela (Grape fest)’. A few workers were on to their routines of cleaning up the place and watering the plants.

And then there were squirrels, which were half-alarmed by the humans, but half-curious to see what they can get. The dogs seemed to enjoy it too – and were playing beside the walking path.

I also got to see quite a few water birds. It seems strange that these birds are generally not visible to the casual visitor but if you have a camera in your hand you tend to spot quite a few of them. There were egrets, pond herons, ducks, mynas, kites and other birds that I don’t know the names of. There was a huge pelican too and it was quite a sight to see it fly.

I clicked a few snaps and waited until sunset and returned back home content with my visit.

So when Manja asked me if I wanted to come for a trek to Ettina Bhuja and Ombattu Gudda, I was in 2 minds. On one hand, this is an opportunity not to miss. It had been a long time since I had gone on a trek and I didn’t want to miss this opportunity. On the other hand, both Ettina Bhuja and Ombattu Gudda are moderately tough treks and require the help of guides. In fact, Ombattu Gudda is known for people getting in and never coming back, and then being found unconscious. There have been incidents of snake bites, and people getting lost forever. In fact, most of the people who had come with us on the trip had gone to Ombattu Gudda just a couple of weeks back and had lost their way in the woods. Thankfully they found their way out to tell us the story. They said even the GPS was useless because of the dense vegetation. This time, not only were they planning to go again, but take an altogether different route which was seldom taken. Further, it was 2 treks in 2 days. To add to it, I was kind of busy with my office work and the fact that it had been a year since I did a trek made me a bit uncomfortable. It is in these situations where the decision that you take in the moment makes a difference. I decided to go.

Manja did the complete organization and I didn’t have to do a whole lot. We communicated over mail and the trip plan and the list of things to carry was all known a week prior. Here is the list: 1 or more pairs of dress, torch and spare batteries, cap/hats, camera, match box/lighter, sleeping bag, knife, tissues, kerosene, sunscreen lotion, 2 liters of water bottle, food items (chapathi, jam, noodles, chocolates, biscuits, dates, glucose, electral, fruits, salt), a good backpack, few spare newspapers/plastic bags, tents, first-aid, paper plates. The plan was to go to Shishila and from there, conquer Ettina Bhuja on the first day, camp there the first night, and then head to Ombattu Gudda the next day and go to Lakshmi estate where we asked the driver to pick us up. The total distance we were planning to trek was about 16-18km.

The preparation for the trek started a week prior to the trek. I had to get a slightly bigger backpack (rucksack) as my backpack would not suffice to carry the sleeping bag, and 2 days worth of food and clothes. I also needed some good shoes as I was uncomfortable with my present one. So I bought a Rucksack (Wildcraft Trailblazer 50 lt), Woodland shoes and a sleeping bag (Wildcraft) over the week. I started wearing the shoes to make sure I am comfortable in them and I started walking to office as swiftly as I can. More than the physical exercise I needed the mental preparation.

We left to Shishila on the night of Feb 11th. I had only an hour or so to put everything into my bag and was extremely nervous of missing something due to the last minute packing. We reached Shishila early morning on 12th at around 6:30. We had made breakfast arrangements at a person’s (by name Gokhale) house. We had breakfast and got our food for the afternoon packed from there and headed to Ettina Bhuja.

It wasn’t long before the excitement began. In the first 15 minutes of our trek, we had to cross 3 streams. Typically when you trek to places, the first few minutes you are extremely careful about not getting your shoes/clothes wet and are wary about our moves. But once you accidentally drop into the water, you stop caring and that is when the actual excitement begins. It was the 2nd stream when it happened to me.

It was uncommon to come across streams, dried up river-beds, dense vegetation, numerous previously unseen strange plants/trees, plain grass-lands etc. The elevation was not a lot to begin with but it steadily increased as we neared the summit. If you ask me, this is not quite the right time to go to Charmadi Ghats since the summer heat makes you perspire and lose water – which can lead to dehydration or muscle cramps. It was extremely humid and the 8kg baggage on the back only adds to the woes. I had my camera hanging from my neck during the initial part of the trek, but this only made things worse as I had to hold it with one hand to prevent it from swaying and this made it difficult to climb. So during the tougher parts of the trek, I had to keep it in my rucksack so that I could balance my body better.

Having an SLR is wonderful if someone could drop it at the summit along with the lenses and the tripod, but if you need to carry it with you for every inch of the trek it is an entirely different situation. I was in 2 minds when I started the trip as to whether to carry my 70-300mm lens, whether to carry the camera bag or to just stuff the body and the 18-55 lens in the rucksack. I decided to go with the telephoto.

You ask the guide how much time it takes and whatever he says, you don’t think of it as a lot, but then you realize that the time he says and the time you take could be easily a factor of 3-4 apart. So after a while you get used to multiplying the time he says with 3 and estimating the time remaining. It is very similar to situations where people keep their watches 10mins faster than the actual time and automatically read it by deducting 10mins when they need to know the time. My previous trek experiences had taught me one thing. Expect more. Prepare for the worst. Unless you are at the summit, you are not there (I know this might seem obvious, but if you have been trekked somewhere you will know what I mean).

You go through dense vegetation which provides you some relief from the sun. But there are grass-lands where the sun hits you directly. In these situations you rely on your hat to protect yourself from the sun and this makes you feel hotter and you feel like removing your hat and feel the sun is better, atleast it doesn’t make you feel you are inside a sack.

It is easy to get philosophical after a while and you start thinking about the experience and put it in the context of your comfy homes and polluted cities and debate in your mind, why one is better than the other.

I am not sure how many hills we had to cross to finally reach the summit but I can tell you it was a lot. Although I had a heavy breakfast I was extremely hungry after about 4 hours of trekking. We stopped to lunch on the way and lied down to take a small nap. I actually rested on some pointed rocks and had announced that I am not getting up until we are moving again. The food that we packed consisted of 5 chapathis each and this seemed like god-sent. It was as if we deserved it for some feat that we had achieved. We constantly compared this to the expensive and unworthy food that we have in Bangalore. After lunch, I used my sleeping bag like a pillow and rested for some time. It was a blissful moment.

Post the lunch break we started off again. It seemed like everyone had revitalized themselves and the first 15 mins after lunch everyone seemed to climb very quickly. But then it was the same story all over again. Typically you expect your bag to become lighter as the day progresses, since you drink water and have food, but then when you put the bag on your back you don’t feel any difference. We entered a grass land and it got extremely hot. We actually took more breaks than before lunch.

At one point close to the summit I just dumped my bag beside a rock and collapsed next to it. I was extremely exhausted and wanted a break. I think I rested for about 15 mins and then when I pulled my bag up I saw a snake right below the place where I had dumped the bag. It was brownish in color and about a feet in length.

Beyond this it was just another 10 mins and we reached the place where we were supposed to camp. There is a small stream about 5 mins from the camping area; we filled our bottles, washed up and started pitching our tents. We didn’t have a lot of time as it was already 4:30 and we had to get firewood for the campfire and pitch our tents and then head to the peak – which was another 30-45 mins of climb – we had to be there before sunset.

The final climb to the summit is extremely dangerous but entirely worth it.

You can see the wonderful hill ranges, and the sun setting behind them. One of the important peaks visible from the summit is Amedikkallu. We clicked quite a few snaps and I got to use my telephoto.

We didn’t want to stay there until sunset as it would be extremely tough to climb down in the dark – considering that it was a new moon day. So we got down to a slightly lower elevation and continued to experience the sunset.

We got back to our tents and started preparing noodles. One of the hottest topics that we discussed was the plan for the next day. We realized at this point that the guide (who supposedly has been doing this for 20 years) had not once taken the route that we planned to take. He showed us a huge peak next to ours and said “Cross that, and then another one, and then another one and then you have the peak of Ombattu Gudda” – that’s 4 in all! After the first day’s experience most of us were not prepared to go through with this and we started enquiring about alternate routes.

As a parting remark, let me add something from Bill Bryson’s ‘Walk in the woods’: If there is one thing that the AT (Appalachian Trail) teaches, it is low-level ecstacy — something we could all do with more of in our lives.

To read more about this particular trek:
Manjunath’s post on Ettina Bhuja trek
Sundaram’s post on Ettina Bhuja trek

(This post is not yet complete – day 2’s experiences yet to come but I didn’t want to be horribly behind on my travel logs so posting this)

The recent trips are all from the list and this trip was one of them.

We had studied the routes and estimated the time and once again, we finished the trip according to the plan. We used Google Maps and Wikimapia to find the exact locations of these places and a few online blogs to learn what is worth visiting.

The idea was to cover these places in one circle – start from Indiranagar, go to Kanakapura road, visit the places around Kanakapura road, and then use the Kaglipura junction to reach Bannerghatta road and then onto Begur and back. The round trip would be close to 90km. We started from Indiranagar at around 6am and reached Turahalli around 7am just in time for sunrise. The hill over here is a very short climb and you can see quite a few people visiting this place for their morning walk, exercise etc.

The place is filled with varieties of birds. The hills are famous for rock-climbing and you will see that quite a few of these have been named and the difficulties of climbing them have been identified.

On the top, you see a small Shani temple. The temple was closed when we visited.

After satisfying ourselves with a 100 snaps, we headed to Agara village. You need to take a diversion from Kanakapura road towards Agara village; very close to the NICE road. The diversion is close to Tataguni bus stop. This place has a small tank (Agara kere or Agara lake). The route to Agara is pretty good and is a good place to escape the city life.

From here, we headed to Chudahalli reservoir. Agara and Chudahalli are very close to each other. This place has quite a few water birds and butterflies so is an ideal spot to use your telephotos. Supposedly, this place is even better in the rainy season.

We then took an internal road to reach Kaggalipura and then headed to Bannerghatta. This stretch has bad roads and for quite some distance you won’t see a soul. There are a few lakes on the way (including TK Falls or Thottikallu falls). We had earlier planned to visit this place too, but the locals told us that the place had almost dried up and it is not worth visiting. Considering that it was noon and the sun was sharp, and we had to walk a km to reach the place, we decided not to visit.

We then headed to Begur. Begur is famous for the Pancha Lingeshwara Temple which is said to be about 1300 years old. Begur was supposedly prominent during the Chola era. It is easy to reach this place via Hosur road and is the suggested route if you are visiting from the city. However, since we were coming from Bannerghatta, we took the route via Hulimavu.

The place is undergoing renovation. They plan to clean up the walls and the inscriptions and build the dwaras (doors).

We took the Hosur road to enter the city and were back by evening.

We started from Bangalore at around 5 in the morning. The route to Horanadu was mostly fine except for the last stretch. We took the following route: Bangalore (NH4) -> Nelamangala on to NH48 -> Kunigal -> Yediyur -> Channarayapatna -> Hassan -> continue on SH57 to Belur -> Chikmagalur -> Aldur -> Balehonnur -> Magundi -> Balehole -> Horanadu. The road from Magundi to Horanadu was not very good although it is very scenic. It is a stretch of about 40km.

You can very easily make out when you enter Chikmagalur district. The place becomes more green, you can see quite a few hills, lakes, areca nut trees, coffee plantations, and the air is cooler and pure. We clicked a few snaps on the way.

We reached Horanadu at around 1:30pm. We visited the temple, prayed to the temple goddess, Shree Annapoorneshwari, and then had lunch there. After a few more snaps, we headed to Kalasa.

There are quite a few places in Kalasa and a shutterbug can easily spend a couple of days here. Our first stop was at Kotehole, then to Rudra Teertha and a visit to Amba Teertha. The road to Amba Teertha is not very good and it is recommended that you take a local vehicle. We spent quite some time at Amba Teertha.

We then visited Duggappana Katte. This is on top of a hill and you can see the Kudremukh hill range, Ballarayana Durga etc from here. On the right is a hill which if you trek to the top, you can see Sringeri on the other side. Duggappana Katte is an ideal spot to watch the sunset.

This was followed by a visit to Vasishta Theertha. It was dark by the time we came back from here and we called it a day.

(This post is still not complete.)

We had done the required preparations for the trip – mapping out all the places that we intended to visit and the distances to each of them and the things that we had to carry.

We left Bangalore at 5am in the morning. Our plan was to reach Chitradurga by noon with a visit to Vanivilas Sagar Dam on the way. The road to Chitradurga is very good; it is part of the North South corridor. The driver of our car felt like we had paid the price (toll) to rip on the roads and he was treated to a wonderful road where he was easily reaching 120-150 kmph (the maximum speed of an Indica).

We visited Vanivilas Sagar Dam around 10:15. Vanivilas Sagar Dam, aka Mari Kanive, is the oldest dam in the state. I had been to the dam just a couple of months back and so I knew that there is a way to the top.

We clicked quite a few snaps and experimented with our cameras for about an hour’s time. We then headed to Chitradurga. On the way you can see quite a few wind-mills.

We reached Chitradurga around noon. We had made bookings in Fort Resort.

We wanted to have a quick lunch and then head to the fort, so were asked to check out the Khanavalis just outside the fort. There is one street which is full of them and you can get a full meal for as much as Rs. 25.

Post lunch, we toured the Chitradurga fort. We took a guide because we didn’t want to miss anything. The guide took us to all the important places in the fort – it took more than a couple of hours for him to give us just a brief overview of the history of the fort. The guide started with an explanation of the 7 circles (Elu suttina kote) and said that 2 of the circles were lost to the city expansion. The main entrance of the fort is close to the 3rd door. The doors are positioned in such a way that you could easily lose your way inside; you cannot see one door from another. There are quite a few watch towers (batheris) and the watch towers are positioned such that any information can be passed on from one tower to another. Enemies would have a tough time inside the fort because the people at the watch towers can see the enemies while the enemies are unaware of the fact that someone is watching them. Some of the important batheris in the fort are visible near the 4th and 6th doors.

One of the first things you see after you enter is ‘Yenne Kola’ – a small tank where they used to store oil required to illuminate the fort.

Beyond this is the 4th door. A popular way of attacking forts was to use logs to pierce through or use elephants to barge through the doors. In order to prevent such attacks, the doors were built with a wall in front.

The sixth door has an Islamic style on one side and a Hindu architecture on the other. This was done by Hyder Ali after his victory to show the unity between the Hindus and the Muslims.

The place is filled with temples. One of the first ones you come across is the Meludurga Siddhi Vinayaka Temple. The statue is carved out of a stone which has the resemblance of an elephant in the back.

Chitradurga is named after “Chitra” “Kallina” “Durga” which means “art in rock forms in the fort”. Near this temple, you can see quite a few such artistic formations – the elephant, the rabbit, the frog, the fish, and the turtle.

You also see the famous Jhanda Batheri from this place – a watch tower where they hoisted a flag to commemorate the victory in the battles and wars.

Once you enter the seventh door, you see quite a few temples and monuments. On one of the hills is Tuppada Kola – a place where they used to store a special type of ghee, used to sharpen the swords. Then there is Gaali Gopura, Muruga Math, Hidimbeshwara temple.

You also see a mud fort near the center of the fort – this was to absorb the heat from the otherwise rocky fort. In order to withstand the attack of water, the mud was solidified with egg shells, pieces of pottery, jaggery etc and was mixed together by stamping on it, using horses for this purpose.

Beyond this, on the other side of the fort, you can see Akka Tangiyara Kola – place where there was natural rain water harvesting, Obavvana Kindi etc.

The walls of the fort have been built in such a way that you cannot remove a single rock from the bottom without dismantling it from the top.

One of the attractions in the fort is a person who is popularly called Kothi-raj who climbs the walls and boulders in this fort without a rope. Kothi-raj has an international reputation in climbing and has 9 gold medals to his credit.

We returned to the resort after a long and tiring day, feeling accomplished!

The second day, we started with a visit to Holalkere. Holalkere is about 33 km from Chitradurga city. It is famous for the Ganesha statue which is more than 500 years old.

We then visited Chandravalli caves (or Ankali Math). This is one attraction that you should not miss if you are to visit Chitradurga. This place has 3 things – a trek to a hill closeby, the caves and the huge rocks. The caves were inhabited by the saints of Ankali math who used to meditate here. The caves are pitch dark inside and you need a torch to visit these places. You can get guides to show you around.

This was followed by a visit to Adumalleshwara temple – about 10km from the city. This place has a zoo and is a popular picnic spot for the locals.

Finally, we visited Himavat Kedaya – this is a short trek of about 1km from Adumalleshwara temple. You see a water fall and a nandi. They say, water flows from the Nandi’s mouth 365 days a year.

The only place that we had planned to visit but couldn’t was Jogimatti. You need permission of the forest officials to visit this place and we couldn’t get it.

I have included a map of the route to Mari Kanive, and to Chitradurga from Bangalore, and the route to Holalkere, Jogimatti and Chandravalli caves here:

All in all, it was a good start for the year.

So here are the steps I have been following with full manual photography:

1. Composition – Photography is an art. The most important aspect of a photo is the composition. We have seen how sometimes an image taken even with a point-and-shoot turns out to be better than the best of the DSLR’s. Composition is more important than you may think! So whenever you intend to click something, look at what you want to capture – move around to see what might be the best position from where to capture. Decide on horizontal or vertical orientation of the camera. What is the amount of noise (unwanted things in the image). Can it be reduced? Can the noise be made interesting? Think about what your image should look like before clicking – don’t leave it entirely upto the camera. Sometimes you may actually have to take a couple of snaps to see what it looks like, before you get the right shot but don’t that’s only for minor recorrections.
   The composition determines the focal length – distance from your camera to the subject that you want to capture. We then look at the exposure triangle.
   
2. Determine where the subject is and bring the subject in focus. Lock the subject and then adjust the composition. You can use the Al-Servo focus mode when you are clicking moving subjects, but otherwise it is recommended NOT to use this mode, so that you don’t introduce motion blur due to focus-ring adjustment. If you are clicking images from the same distance like in parties, you may even want to put the camera lens in manual focus mode so that it doesn’t readjust itself everytime you click a new snap.
3. Aperture – One of the important things that is often got wrong by most beginners is the depth of field – the part of the image that appears sharp in the image. Digital cameras automatically adjust the depth of field when you shoot in one of the auto shooting modes, but a perfect photo is one where you clearly define the planes that you want to capture. Determine the depth of field that you need. There are no specific rules here, but I have seen that an aperture of f/11-f/14 works well for flower macros. One thing that people get confused about is the relationship between distance and aperture. A subject far away from the camera does NOT mean that the aperture is lower. It is the distance between the nearest plane and the farthest plane that determines the aperture that you need. If you have a subject close to the camera and you want the landscape as well, you will need a very low aperture setting, while if you just need the subject OR the landscape far off, you can do with a higher aperture. First determine what planes you want and your distance from the subject to determine the aperture.

   The flower in the center of the image below is in full focus, while the one on the right is partially blurred out, and the one on the left is mostly blurred out giving a sense of depth. (You can read more about my flower macro photography experiences here).

   
4. ISO and Shutter speed – Have the ISO as minimal as possible. The optimal shutter speed is automatically determined by the camera and this is shown as an exposure reading which should be close to 0 (some snaps might require it to be at -1 or +1 or further away but that’s an exception than a norm). With the minimal ISO, see what the camera indicates as the shutter speed. If the speed is slower than 1/(current focal-length) of the camera, then you will need a tripod. If you can’t use a tripod, increase the ISO until the shutter speed is manageable without a tripod.

   The following image had to be taken with a higher ISO because the interiors of the temple was very dark.

   

   Here are some variations to the rule:
   When you want to introduce blur into images, you may have to use both the shutter speed and the aperture to do the math and then control the ISO accordingly.

   When clicking fast moving far-off subjects like birds, you may have to increase the ISO to a much higher number so that you don’t introduce shakes.

   Depending on your camera type, increasing the ISO beyond a point introduces a lot of noise, so you may NOT want to increase the ISO beyond a certain value, so you under-expose the image and then rescue the under-exposed image using tools like GIMP.

   
5. Now determine other things like White balance (depending on the amount of light available). In bright sunlight, I have switched between sunlight, shade and cloudy. Increasing the temperature, gives a warmth to the image. However, when post-processing an image, you may have to reduce the saturation. I sometimes prefer to set the white-balance as auto and then post-process the image to introduce the warmth by playing with color levels and the saturation settings.
6. Determine the metering mode.
7. Click!

Note: The first 4 steps are extremely important. It is extremely tough to rescue an image if these go wrong. A lot of things beyond 4 can be done via post processing using tools like GIMP or Photoshop. Sometimes you may want to deliberately over-expose or under-expose your image and then post-process it using GIMP (or Photoshop) to get what you want as I have shown in these posts on rescuing under-exposed images and adding warmth. Check out the rest of my posts on photography here.

The recession was expected to hit and it was supposed to be a bad time to switch jobs.

It was a roller coaster ride right from the beginning but I enjoyed it thoroughly. The first all hands meet (all hands meets in startups are NOT about going to a fancy hotel and spending the day playing games), we discussed the recession that was about to hit and several alternatives were discussed to cut the costs and extend the runway. Things didn’t work out as expected and the next all hands I saw the team strength reduce to roughly half!

Right from the beginning, I liked the “openness” culture that was part of the company. Engineers got to decide to a large extent the roadmap and product features, and also interact with and learn from the users directly. A lot of what was being built was being determined based on user feedback. We had a whole bunch of success stories on the way.

4 months into my job, I came to know that we were about to be acquired. It came as a surprise to me, because things appeared so drastic. We had only started tasting success. Why this sudden decision? What about my dreams of working in a startup? Will Ugenie continue to function like one? How will things be different? Will our dreams be crushed by this parent company? Will there be a change in culture?

However, things didn’t change a lot – if anything it got better. While we did gain some financial stability, which allowed us to think about and execute longer term projects (measured in weeks instead of days), things didn’t change drastically in terms of work and the responsibilities that people had. Plus, we got to work with an excellent team over at Lulu spearheaded by Bob.

Now when I look back, I feel, making the switch was one of the most important decisions I took in my life. The last 1.5 years has been such an experience that I could not have expected from IBM.

So, after this wonderful journey, here I am, making the next leap in my career. I have accepted an offer from an early stage seed funded startup and am beginning work early next week. Why the decision? Well, it just feels right and I am mentally prepared to take up the responsibilities that this job entails.

During the course, I made some amazing new friends each of whom is unique in their own personal way. I would like to thank every one of you, who I have interacted with directly or indirectly, for the many things that I have learnt from you. It was a pleasure to know you.

A parting quote:
…, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. –