No Content, No Fuss: Category travel

Sushi, Seattle and Seahawks

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:21:00 +0100

So I'm hanging at the XenSource Redmond office for a few days, and munching on delicious sushi at Flo, and it turns out that the dude behind us was none other than Matt Hasselbeck! It seems like only two years ago that I was cheering on the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Bus as they owned the Seahawks.

Unfortunately, I only realised my brief brush with celebrity on our way out of the restaurant, which also probably saved me from saying something stupid to him. As if! But anyway, the, err, moral of this post is that you must check out Flo Sushi if you're in Seattle and eat the spider roll, it's awesome.

Karnatik Jazz, Live Painting, and such things...

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 21:28:00 +0100

Had a great evening out in San Francisco on Friday, when we visited the Red Poppy Art House on Folsom Street to check out a really unique Jazz experience.

The boys from VidyA recently took up an artist-in-residence position there, and performed their fusion of traditional Indian Karnatik music with modern Jazz pieces. They've been making some waves in the SF Jazz scene already it seems, and to top it all of, the owner of the art house did a live painting session during the performance. The audience passed out random bits of stuff, and he incorporated it into a piece done over the course of an evening. Talk about artistic overload!

Love the area as well; there's a nice friendly coffee-house down the road (which is pretty much my only criteria, apart from not getting shot and such).

My school was never this cool.

The area was a mix of Latino and African, it seemed

And in the Red Poppy Art House, eclectic art abounds

Google Webmaster tools

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 15:04:00 +0000

The conversion of the Recoil web services to external FastCGI pinned our Trac installation at Melange as the source of the CPU hogging. It turned out the Google crawler was indexing the entire source tree via Trac, causing it to go ballistic.

I then stumbled on the latest cool Googlism: the Google Webmaster Tool, which lets you register your sites and displays options, diagnostics and statistics about how the Google crawler views your website. I turned down the frequency at which Google hits the Trac installation (as well as installing a suitable robots.txt file). This solved the immediate problem, but some of the search statistics were fun to check out as well.

It turns out the gallery is pretty highly ranked for image searches. My trips to Japan seems to have made it big, with popular searches including "Shibuya", "tokyo at night", and "japanese roof". My random pictures of indian buffaloes, smoggy skylines and fried ice-cream seem especially popular as well. It's a wierd old Internet eh?

The gallery has fallen a bit by the wayside in recent months. I'll update it when I get back to Cambridge!

Wanderings through Northern India

avsm — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 14:38:00 +0000

When I visit India, I normally stick to the south where most of my extended family lives. In a miniature rebellion this Christmas, I took up my good friends' Seb and Sheree on their offer to show me around their towns of New Delhi and Kolkata. The trip has ended up being a huge amount of fun, as we combined tourism with a suitable dose of partying in such places as the Tolly Country Club for Xmas Eve (which has a waiting list of decades for membership!!!). I'm currently in Kolkata with my parents, and sadly heading back to Cambridge in a few days. I think this will be the first time I actually miss leaving India, as the North seems to be the distinct winner over South India in terms of being more modern and fun...

Seb and Sheree pose in Delhi

Mad Xmas Eve party in Calcutta

Mummy and a Xmas tree!

Blog exclusive... shocking secrets

avsm — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 01:57:22 +0100

The time has come to reveal a dark secret, hidden for many years, subject to taunting from my esteemed colleagues (you know who you are!). Yes, its true... I dont know how to swim!. Never got around to it... sink like a rock ... nose too big ... the excuses really piled up.

However, after several viewings of Titanic on various plane journies and cheap movie nights, it was time to end this impasse. And, luckily enough, my buddy Colin in Hong Kong has a pool at his place in Tsing Yi. A mere two hours of trying later (and some expert tuition), I can do a backstroke and avoid drowning and crying like a baby! And even better, I'm spending a week in a hotel in Japan, with a pool! Is this heaven?

PS: Your turn to learn now djs. Oops, did I just reveal two dark personal secrets in this blog exclusive?

Hong Kong, best city on the globe?

avsm — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 01:18:39 +0100

I decided to stop by Hong Kong for a couple of days en route to Ubicomp in Japan, and stayed with Sibyl's parents and Colin for a couple of days. My impression of Hong Kong has just been completely awesome! Its been a packed couple of days, as we walked up to Victoria Peak to get a really cool view of the city from above, grabbed the Star Ferry to look at the mainland side, and of course went shopping everywhere to find the good deals. Some things really made Hong Kong stand out though...

The Octopus card is an anonymous stored-value card that you just put some cash into, and can then seamlessly use on all of the public transport (and even restaurants and dessert places). It makes it so quick and easy to get around. London is just starting to catch up with Oyster, but Hong Kong leads the way with almost everyone having this card. It's great to see it implemented the correct way and letting individuals preserve their anonymity instead of a centralised e-cash system.
The food is simply awesome, ranging from the seafood on the floating Jumbo to the incredibly fresh Mango deserts at Hui Lau Shan. Not only does it taste great and fresh, its super-cheap, as most people I talked to preferred to eat out rather than cook as it works out cheaper and easier!
Everything is clean and spotless; although most people live in really tall tower blocks, the public places are really large and well laid out, so it never felt claustrophobic (even coming from somewhere like little Cambridge).
Unlike Japan, where its quite a lot of hassle to get around without speaking some Japanese, most people I met in Hong Kong spoke enough English to get by (as you might imagine given its history). It was much less stress-free; I could consider living in Hong Kong I think, unlike Japan which I love to visit but not actually move to.
It isn't flat. Must...leave...Cambridge...

Hong Kong on a misty day

I loved the floating restaurants

Buildings. Lots of buildings

Travelling the land of contradictions

avsm — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 19:36:07 +0100

My Dad and I have been in India for over a week now, travelling across quite a few cities visiting relatives and catching up with friends. Our trip started in Bangalore, unfortunately for the funeral service a close family friend. Despite the reasons for going, Bangalore turned out to be the first city in India I would describe as "pleasant", with glorious sunshine and a temperature that was always just right!

I was pretty impressed with the pace of development there as well, with software development being outsourced there at a huge rate. However, despite the shining new Silicon Valley-style buildings, the infrastructure still needs a lot of work as traffic is insane and getting around the place is pretty tough (starting with the lame airport!). It's been 23 years since I was last here, and it's definitely been worth the visit. Dad and I are currently in Hyderabad, so here are a few pictures I snapped over the last few days.

The memorial ceremony

Traffic really is crazy

It looks like de_dust!

Blog updating 30,000 feet in the sky

avsm — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:05:02 +0100

So I'm half-way to Tokyo Narita on a Lufthansa flight, and I happened to open my laptop and discover that they have in-flight WiFi access! So I did what any self-respecting person would do ... update my blog! Very cool indeed, although a bit latent it offers complete IP access (no proxies), and even UDP so Skype works (barely).

sleek:~ avsm$ ping recoil.org
PING recoil.org (194.70.3.133): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 194.70.3.133: icmp_seq=0 ttl=235 time=631.553 ms
64 bytes from 194.70.3.133: icmp_seq=1 ttl=235 time=629.864 ms
64 bytes from 194.70.3.133: icmp_seq=2 ttl=235 time=626.753 ms

sleek:~ avsm$ traceroute recoil.org
traceroute to recoil.org (194.70.3.133), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  172.16.64.1 (172.16.64.1)  3.330 ms  26.993 ms  2.348 ms
 2  cbb-cds-psn.by.boeing (172.16.0.18)  2.131 ms  2.177 ms  2.074 ms
 3  sbs.by.boeing (172.31.0.1)  2.500 ms  2.797 ms  2.137 ms
 4  * * *
 5  10.10.36.21 (10.10.36.21)  587.252 ms  745.720 ms  581.943 ms
 6  mos02r03-v25.connexionbyboeing.net (10.10.36.2)  769.563 ms  583.565 ms  581.822 ms
 7  mos02r21-f2-9.connexionbyboeing.net (10.10.32.25)  580.833 ms  869.622 ms  656.564 ms
 8  10.10.32.33 (10.10.32.33)  581.529 ms  764.980 ms  570.506 ms
 9  mos02r01-f2-3.connexionbyboeing.net (10.10.32.130)  585.012 ms  582.451 ms  768.756 ms
10  mos02r02-f2-3.connexionbyboeing.net (10.10.32.131)  580.568 ms  580.606 ms  586.664 ms
11  asd2-rou-1014.nl.eurorings.net (134.222.97.217)  1391.234 ms  737.475 ms  1024.744 ms
(...etc)

Continent Hopping

avsm — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:55:09 +0100

I'm back in Los Angeles, just in time for the one week in Southern California when it rains. Ah well ... at least it's warm! Had a good flight over on Air New Zealand's business class cabin, which had fantastic service much better than British Airways' Club World. Meanwhile, here is a short selection of photographs taken over the last few days.

Evening supper at Selwyn Formal Hall

Hanging with Nick and Jasper on High Street Kensington

3000 miles later in Costco, Anand poses with a Bowflex

Enough travelling already

avsm — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:20:36 +0100

Sitting in the New York JFK United lounge (which incidentally, has free wifi). Spent a great week in Princeton with Sandy Fraser at Fraser Research - full coverage available in Dave "blogthief" Scott's blog.

Ordered a Cyclades TS-800 to act as serial console server for the Flirble and Recoil machine clusters. Hopefully this should cure the woes with remote management of x86 servers (why, oh why, can't they have something as cool as Sun LOM?)