Back ... after a brief hiatus

3 weeks of "silence".

In this time , I expierenced torrential rains which brought Bombay to a standstill , attended Aparup wedding (- was in Bangalore for a week for that) and went through a lot of "pain" 'cos my net conn went down :-(

The rains were a sight to behold - the day it started , when I woke up from a siesta I thought it was 7-ish at night ! The sky was so grey and dark it was scary.
Luckily (if you can call it that) , very few lightening/thunder related accidents ... I better not attempt to describe the aftermath of the downpour.

Managed to make it to Bangalore on friday (2 weeks back) - luckily : 'cos the airport was open only for a short window of time allowing me to attend the wedding which happened over the weekend (30th/31st july).

Which brings us to a curious coincidence -
When I came to Bangalore 4 years back , Alok picked me up from the airport and all of us (a batch of about 38 freshers who joined Sun) were put up at Hotel Chancery ... on 30th (29th ?) of July 2001.
This time , 'cos of flight delays , Alok came down again to pick me up from airport and guess what - Aparup's reception was at Hotel Chancery !
It was kinda weird :)

Stayed with Alok and Jenny last week ... had a great time - and since Jenny also loves chocolates : we were muching away to glory most of the time ;-)
WHile I was there , watched a really nice chinese flick with them - "House of Flying Daggers" : really neat movie :-)

Was tied up a bit during my stay there and could meet only few (most others seemed to be unreachable by phone).

Which brings us to the last part of what I wanted to post about .... more like a rant.
I have been quite satisfied with MTNL's ADSL broadband connection - though it does not come anywhere near the 512KBps I am paying for , it is quite stable (which is very important for me ) and still gives decent bandwidth.

I come back from Bangalore to find it not working ... went through the bureaucratic hoops to raise a complaint , etc , etc.
Considering the recent onslaught of rains , I did not expect prompt service - hell , in any other city in India the phones would have been down for another month or so I guess !
But the problem was that , the carrier was back up but the modem was not able to train to it.
Used a slow WLL backup conn (parents) to trawl the web for possible solutions , gave up in disgust after a lot of searching and started fooling around in earnest.
Modified tonnes of settings - there are a lot of them , with lot of combinations possible and it is NOT script friendly - requiring reboots for any change to take effect. So it was all manual :-(
The modem as such runs on linux - so there was some element of silver lining in the whole episode :-)

3 days later , I am getting it to work !

I found that the modem requires a firmware upgrade and that MTNL has modified the modulation type - shouldn't these people not inform the users beforehand about a change like this ?
I would assume that most , if not all , MTNL users will be disrupted by a change of this sort ... more relieved to get back my conn right now , maybe by tommorrow morning , I will be amazingly pissed at the way MTNL took a dump on me :)

To bed now , Vincent is tweaking/testing/bugfixing/etc his program in earnest for the upcoming World computer chess champs - all the best to Diep !

Which reminds me , Alok described an idea for solving a suduko and when I got back , finished an impl in about 10 mins or so (surprisingly simple code !) ... and guess what , it takes a fraction of a sec for the toughest problems I saw on the web.
Considering the permutations possible , his idea is a very powerful heurestic - will post the code someplace soon I guess ... or maybe not , there are tonnes are solvers already available :-)