Infrastructure

Looks like nature agrees with the average Bangalorean!! Infrastructure in India's IT capital is bad. Period.

None of the cries of the citizens was falling on the ears of the "soil people". Mother nature has proved it beyond doubt that Bangalore is crumbling. No, the problems of the past few days are not because of heavy rains. Make no mistake, its all because of bad/non-existent roads, badly planned localities, closing of lakes and poor quality of construction. The overall rain per day has been about 1/10th of what it was in Mumbai on July 26th. So.. sorry... "it all happened because of heavy rains" is not a valid excuse.

Which brings me to another topic...I have been commuting on Hosur Road for the past few months...and come to realize that a few very simple things can make traffic on that road much more manageable.

- There is never a jam as such on Hosur Road. Its almost always slow moving traffic. In such situations, discipline becomes paramount. The police need to figure out a way to stop motorists from criss-crossing.

- If you want to ask me the one big reason for traffic woes on Hosur Road, its because of the vehicles that take the service road and then try to rejoin the main road. Ban such diversions, punish the offenders, device ways to ensure only the genuine users of the service roads get on to it.

- Put up some bridges for people to cross roads...and ensure that they cross it only at those designaged junctions. You are forced to brake atleast 10 times each way because of some idiot wanting to cross the road and not bothered about the fact that he may lose his life.

- Forget the idea of an elevated road or whatever. It seems they are planning it with a toll booth in mind. Imagine guys, the jams will be at the toll booth instead of the road. Spend 90 minutes in a queue approaching the toll booth and then reach Ecity in 10 minutes!!

- Just build underpasses or road over bridges at the three bottlenecks between Silk Board and E-City. It will work...believe me!!

- Please put educated folks to manage traffic at the junctions. They never seem to get the point that if the traffic on the main road is about 10 times more than that on the cross-roads, the traffic on the main road needs to be allowed about 10 times longer than the cross-roads. The pile ups are almost always because of the empty space between the ears of the people managing traffic!

Any more suggestions??

Its pouring in Bangalore

The past couple of days has been horrible for Bangalore. Apparently, we are breaking all kinds of records when it comes to the amount of rain we've received this year. October has been particularly harsh. Wipro office on Hosur Road has several feet of water and the Silk Board flyover is completely flooded.

I could not make it to office till noon. Luckily, I obtained a RSA SecureID card last week and am now able to connect to office from home. So, was working from home in the morning. Which reminds me...the 'work from home' policy/facilities/resources over here are vastly superior in quality from what it was in a certain three lettered company that I worked for in my previous life ;-) especially the policy...there is a certain criteria for being eligible for such facilities...and once you are eligible...your manager (or the other evils) have no control over it.

Anyway, coming back to the rains...me managed to drive through 2 ft of water near the Silk Board flyover. But they have now closed the E-city to Silk Board road. So I need to take the Anekal-Bannerghatta road to get back home. Getting ready for a long long drive back.

I read a strange item today in one of the newspapers. There was a writeup about what famous personalities do when they are stuck up in traffic. One of them apparently keeps gulping litres of water when he is in the car. Absolutely amazing!! One of my big worries while driving is how to keep my bla*&** under control till I reach home ;-))) Hez got a setup in his car or what :-)

Linux Desktop

Sripathi talks about some interesting reasons why Linux Desktop is getting closer in performance (or the lack of it) to Windows :-) LWN today has pointed out two projects which are trying to do something on this front. It does seem like we will have a good desktop a couple of years from now.

Read these - BetterDesktop and Tango Desktop Project.

Conferences

November to January looks like will be a very hectic phase for me at work. Working on a paper for the CCGrid conference to be submitted by November 15. Then there is this new idea I am working on which we are targetting for a paper submission by January.

Of course there is also the Linux Bangalore 2005 conference in the first week of December. We may have talk or two on Grid Computing and Virtualization.

I recently read about an IBMer having to resign from his job because of his comments about IIPM on his blogsite. IIPM has sent him a legal notice and apparently threatened IBM that they would stop using Thinkpads if the employee did not take his comments back. What a sick thing to do!

Read more here.