Great Ocean Road

weekend number 11 and still i had not seen the most beautiful place in the state of victoria or maybe even in the whole of australia. so it was high time that i must be visiting this place. the wait was for the right initiation.
my friend venkat was returning back to india after his long stay at melbourne and somehow he had missed visiting this place.. that is until now.. so we grabbed on this chance..
the gang was made up of venkat,santy and myself from 3J; ramjee (sunil), srini and praveen from 6W and sandeep. sandeep had been there before and knew the right places to pitstop. he was also a great driver and enjoyed it. so we booked a toyota tarago which would be tested by sandeep's driving skills and our messing around.

the gang: (from top) venkat,santy,srini,sandy,ramjee,me

nobody minded to get up early on saturday morning..but we boys never make it on time.. whether its meeting a girl on a date or getting up for a trip.. so even though we had planned to leave at 7:30 it was 9 by the time we were belted in the toyota seats.
we had charged up our camera batteries formatted the memory cards and updated our ipods for the 3.5 hour journey from melbourne to the apostles.
even though i was the only one from karnataka in the gang (the others were from Andhra) time in the vehicle was not really boring. we managed to crack jokes on each other.. feed fruits, snacks and coke to our ever growing bellies and listen to favourite songs on ipod. so it was not long before sandy stopped at the first place. we were really amazed by the scene beholding us. mild waves, virgin beach and surprisingly no one else on the beach other than a few surfers. after a few shots for matrimony sites ;) we started playing the favourite winter sport of australia the australian footy. we tried a few kicks and catches at the weird shaped ball and managed to kick it into the ocean a couple of times as well.. but it always managed to come back to us like a favourite dog.. wish girls were like that as well in life ;).

first stop

we unwillingly got back into the toyota with sandy promising more beautiful places ahead. so it was more PJ's,music and feeding again...
next stop was the devil's elbow. its along the road and a very picturesque scenes of the waves dying silently along the road side. we took some snaps and hopped in again for our journey ahead.

devil's elbow

next stop was apollo bay, a small coastal town. since the snacks were doing no good we pulled over here for some burgers and cappuccino.
our next stop was the port campbell national park. 12 (well actually 5 now) apostles is its famous attraction. the best part was the helicopter ride. for 80 AUD for 10 mins you can hitch a ride with a pilot and get the spell bouding views of the apostles. the pilot even explains some of the features of the apostles but who will be willing to listen when there is such a beauty in front of your eyes. it was nature at its best and really amazing. i was so happy to be seeing this in my lifetime and kept saying to myself i am gonna get my parents here as well..

the helicopter ride

after the chopper ride we thought of viewing them with a closer proximity so walked along the pathways to get some better matrimony shots :)

12 apostles

London bridge (now london arch) is one of the attractions. they were formed and now being eroded by the waves. it become so weak because of the erosion that the bridge broke away leaving two tourists stranded who were to be rescued using helicopters.
After that we moved on to Loch Ard Gorge. oh... what a place that was.. not just because of what it is now.. but even because of the history. a ship by name loch ard crashed at this very spot and around 50 people aboard were killed. only two survivors were washed away into this gorge and found shelter over there. it is a great example of nature at work. it is like natures workshop or laboratory where every strike of wave is leaving its mark on the gorge. i was truly amazed by its beauty and spent some time over there.

Loch ard gorge

Getting down the human made stairs takes you to the beach where the waves lash with all its fury. it appears like white racing horses running towards the shore with full speed. oh what a sight it was. we managed to reach there at the sunset time and i just sat the edge of the cliff watching the white waves lash. the sound was amazing and the scene like that of heaven.

the virgin beach

we then tried to get some great shots of the waves lashing the cliff and us standing in the front on the cliff. some came good but most of them were a failure.. common we are amateurs.. it was dark then.. and as the sun set we started returning talking excitedly of the great day and some wonderful things we had seen that day. the return journey was silent.. most of us slept.. thankfully sandy ( who was driving the vehicle did not).
all in all one amazing trip i will cherish forever in my life for more than one reason.

below is the clip of a beautiful song shot at the apostles. its from the movie "dil hi dil mein".


if your appetite is still not quenched then go ahead and view this album..
Great Ocean Road

something is cooking...

guys.. seriously please dont bother to spend more time reading this post.. this is seriously from a testing point of view.. if it clicks.. i will surely let you know the result of it.. :)

i walk a lonely road!!!

this is the route i take to office four times a day. hope it will keep me slim :).. thanks to google maps (http://maps.google.com) i can share it withe everyone :)

go ahead zoom in.. to have a closer satellite view of my office at 360 Elizabeth street. it is known as melbourne tower aka melbourne central. i work at the 28th floor and it has about 50 floors. the high speed lifts take us in lightning speed (physicists will commit suicide after reading this) to our floor. the view is absolutely fabulous and i am lucky to have glass on two sides of the corner desk i have.

News choppers and sometimes chartered flights (upto 3 in number) can be seen in a single view.


View Larger Map

Moon for Sale!!!!

Even before i say anything let me say that the title is not something which i came up with. it was the title of a program.. documentary kind of thing and the title did really catch my attention. So i thought hmmmm is Moon for sale.. and if yes what would be the cost of it. At the end of program i did believe that Moon is really for sale and price is more than you can imagine.

I am not sure about the number of people who have made it to moon..and was lazy to google it as well. Of the limited knowledge that i have i believe that the americans invested so much time, money and resources to put their flag on moon is to beat the growing intelligence of the russians in the same field. It was then Neil armstrong said those amazing words "one man step for human.. one big leap for mankind" or something like that.

so why is moon for sale after the americans achieved what they wanted to?? well there is a little physics to it. it is for energy and the vast resource for producing it. We all know about fission and fusion methods for producing energy so wont delve much upon it. Fusion is more powerful than fission and when we say fusion we talk about fusion of hydrogen. But that needs high temperatures.. beyond our imagination. Alternatively there is helium which is having a composition very close to hydrogen. so the same release of neutrons can be achieved in different ways. But helium is a radioactive waste and is available in very little quantity. well little quantity on earth that is. On moon Helium is abundantly available and thats where everyone's interests lies in.

So that question being answered it still poses the questions of how to get helium from moon and send it to earth and then produce energy out of it. well humans know how to get energy out of helium and have been experimenting with it already but how to get helium from moon?? Inhospitable conditions on moon is just one aspect of problem. we will need someone to be there for months.. years may be and excavate Helium from moon. Then there is the question of supporting the sustenance of humans at those conditions.

Anyone would have given up just looking at the above problems but no not us humans. Americans have even tried to create those situations on earth.. well actually under water. they have named it Nemo :) Humans are trained to live there for months at end at one sixth the gravity.

It is a testimony to the humans untiring efforts to achieve the impossible and i am convinced that humans will manage to achieve this formidable, nearly impossible task as well. Maybe not in my lifetime but in my children's lifetime ( if i have that is :) ) there will be people talking about colonization of moon and kids studying about maps on moon belonging to their nations. Its that difficulty of the task which keeps us going.. isn't it. and i am sure we humans will solve this one as any other.

So keen on watching the video? no problem.. google to the rescue... you can watch it below and down below that :). wish our indian government will watch it and encourage the ISRO's attempts to have an indian there as well.





Enjoy!!!!

Let's Build Tree

Tree is one data structure that fascinates me like many other software engineers. So let me try and explore how to populate trees.

here i am trying to load a treeview (system.windows.forms.treeview) control provided by Microsoft .net 2003.

What kind of Database table can be bound to trees?
the above question would be a good start. Basically in most of the cases we will be loading a tree with data from a table which has self referencing data. It means rows which refer other rows as parent records. Along with other attribute columns the below columns is a must in a self referencing table.
ID - primary key of the table
Name - a basic human readable attribute of the entity/row
Parent_ID - column to hold the parents ID to which this row is related.
Parent_Name - (optional) name of the parent to which the child row is related.
In addition it may contain many other columns which describe the entity.

So now that we have defined a suitable candidate to be loaded into the treeview how do we load it. There are different methods to load the control with data. Some people write a recursive function to construct the tree control. This approach is good if there are not many childnodes associated with a node and not much of data to be loaded at the first place. But since in most of the cases it is not the case i prefer to load the control with data on demand. So let me try and explain how to do this.

I will first define a Datatable object and load it with all the data that is to be loaded into the treeview control. let me name it as "treeData".
when the treeview is first shown to the user it must have atleast one node with an expand button (usually + sign) depending on whether the node contains child nodes or not. So let us create two functions. one to add a root node AddRoot and the other to check whether a given node has child nodes or not.

Private Sub AddRoot()
Dim row As DataRow
Dim filter As String = "parent_name = 'ROOT'"
Try
If treeData.Rows.Count > 0 Then
If Not treeData.Select(filter).Length = 1 Then
MessageBox.Show("More than one root or no root is present")
Else
row = treeData.Select(filter).GetValue(0)
trvwLoc.Nodes.Add(row("name"))
If ChildExists(row("name")) Then
trvwLoc.Nodes(0).Nodes.Add("dummy")
End If
End If
End If
Catch ex As Exception
MessageBox.Show(ex.Message)
Finally

End Try
End Sub

what i am trying to do in the above lines of code is to identify the root record. this can be done by updating the parent_name column of the table with a value say 'ROOT'. this will be our first root element. i ofcourse have made a check to make sure that the table must contain only one root element. in cases where more than one root element can be present than you can change the code accordingly to construct multiple root nodes.
ChildExists is a user defined function which will accept a string value and return a boolean result. the purpose of this function is to check whether the node being added contains child nodes and if so add a 'dummy' node to it. this 'dummy' node is needed so that the node being added gets a plus symbol to it informing the user that the node contains child elements. when the user expands this node we will add its relevant child nodes. Below is the definition of the ChildExists function

Private Function ChildExists(ByVal parent As String) As Boolean
Dim filter As String = "parent_mnem = '" & parent & "'"
If treeData.Select(filter).Length > 0 Then
Return True
Else
Return False
End If
End Function

In both the above functions i am using Select method of a DataTable object to apply filters to see whether the node contains any record.

Now let us add code to add the child nodes for a given tree node. Below is the code to do it.

Private Sub AddChildNodes(ByVal parent As TreeNode)
Dim row As DataRow
If parent.Nodes(0).Text = "dummy" Then
parent.Nodes.RemoveAt(0)
Dim filter As String = "parent_name = '" & parent.Text & "'"
Dim sort As String = "name asc"
For Each row In IspLoc1.SM_ISP_LOCATION.Select(filter, sort)
Dim childnode As New TreeNode
childnode.Text = CType(row("name"), String)
If ChildExists(childnode.Text) Then
childnode.Nodes.Add("dummy")
End If
parent.Nodes.Add(childnode)
Next
End If
End Sub

All i am doing in the above code is to check whether the node has child nodes (dummy node). if it does get the children of the node in a sorted manner ( again i am using one of the overridden flavours of Select method ). Make sure to remove the dummy node as the users dont want to see it :) and when adding each child node check whether that node has any more children.

We are just two lines away from completing the implementation and that is to add event handler to call the AddChildNodes method. we will call this on the BeforeExpand event handler of the tree view control. Below is the code for the same.

Private Sub trvwLoc_BeforeExpand(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.TreeViewCancelEventArgs) Handles trvwLoc.BeforeExpand
trvwLoc.SelectedNode = e.Node
AddChildNodes(trvwLoc.SelectedNode)
End Sub
in my code trvwLoc is the name of the tree view control.

So thats the end of it. Let me know if you face any issues. Please be ware that there is one disadvantage in this approach and that is the memory overhead. But i think in the current days performance is of more importance as we have too much of cheap memory :).

happy Coding.. Go and build your tree..

orkut - boon or bane

Recently my company infosys technologies Ltd, Mangalore conducted a contest inviting write ups and other creative art work from its employees. i had come to realise the importance of orkut as it was one of the sites i daily visited to keep in touch with my friends. surprisingly it not only won the early bird prize but also third place in best articles section. so guys it is time for me to confidently torture you all and also eat up some time of yours. please read on.... :)

http://www.orkut.com would be one among the top five addresses that any person glued to the web will key in any browsers address bar. Or if he is like me, he will have the address stored in his favourites. So what is so special about this site that makes everyone visit it.

If one google’s for “Social community sites” without quotes it returns 164,000,000 search results in its traditional lightning speed and you will be surprised that orkut is not in the first page of the search results, well not in the unsponsored links atleast. It is second in the list of sponsored links. Inspite of this it will have “name any” friend of yours or long lost school buddy or school crush and there is a high chance that your search will end in orkut. Orkut was conceptualized and developed by Orkut Buyukkokten and was aptly named after him. He did this in the 20% time he spent at google every day of the week. Google has this concept of every resource spending his 20% time on the thing that he wants to develop. Orkut - the person wanted to develop a social community site and so was the birth of Orkut - the site. Initially google employees were asked to open their profiles and the number of registered users kept on growing and there was no looking back.

The reason orkut has grown so much is because it is more than just a social community site. Apart from just being a repository of your friends it has many communities ranging from serious politics to the daily soap opera (K syndrome) on the television. You can not only join one of these communities but start one of your own and moderate it. Recently my friend mentioned that he has been looking for tintin comic book on the web with no luck. I asked him to check out in orkut as there sure would be a community dedicated to the famous cartoon character. He found not only the community but also the e version of comic book in minutes.

Apart from sharing your favorite snap, blog, favorite videos (basically yourself) you can discuss various things through postings in communities. In fact my communities in orkut ranges from Algorithms, Donald E knuth to Little Johnny jokes and I have gained knowledge from both sides of the range. I and my roomies even have a community dedicated to the apartment in Melbourne we are staying in so that all the ex and current roomies can stay in touch and share their moments. All in all orkut is both for easy going folks and for people with a purpose. And it’s great that one can find both at a single site.

Recently people have started using orkut even for commercial purposes. Whether you want to advertise your apartment or want to sell something. It is gaining popularity as an e-commerce site. In fact I got two replies for my posting when I wanted to find an accommodation in Melbourne before my travel.

There are of course instances of misuse of orkut. People have met the wrong person on orkut and taken that too far. But out of every power that is bestowed to mankind there comes the responsibility and the caution with which that power has to be used. Same is the case with orkut. World Wide Web was developed to make information available from anywhere to anyone. But now we have hackers, black/white and of various other colors. So every pro comes with a con. It is left to the users on how they want to look at things and use it.

With 128 friends I am connected to 67,159,231 people through orkut. There is no second thought that orkut has been definitely a boon to me and in general to the mankind. So do me and probably yourself a favor. Join orkut and add me as a friend if you have not. Happy orkuting

My first video

it was a long time i had used my camera and so when we friends decided that we will visit the melbourne aquarium it was time for me to remove the dust off my camera.

Melbourne aquarium is a must visit on every soul who treads into australia. it contains 2.2 million litres of water and the scariest undersea creatures housed in it. Sharks, sting rays (this is what killed steve irwin - the daring crocodile hunter from australia) of enormous size can be seen fed by divers. so here is the video that i took of sharks and sting rays being feed. enjoy!!!!

feeding of sharks by divers


close view of shark and sting ray