Hyderabaad....

Today is a rare day! I am sitting in my office, no that's not the rare part, the rare part is that the net has been down for more than 2 minutes at a stretch and is showing no signs of coming back to life. Now for an internet technologies company, that's RARE! and it actually gives me some time to do something that has become even rarer for me, writing.

Ah! so now that I have these few precious moments, I mustn't take too long choosing a subject, so here goes what's the most recent in my life....

I went to Hyderabad , last weekend, with a few friends to meet more friends. It was my first such trip with friends and the first travel by air. Now I know the whole world knows what's it like to travel by air, but it was my first experience, and needless to say, exhilarating :) Right from the check-in at the domestic airport of Delhi, to the landing at NT Rama-Rao airport in Hyderabad everything was a wonder to me.

But the fun began after we collected out baggage, and went to the ladies room to freshen up, before . We were greeted by very courteous, very helpful female staff members , which was, having seen the indifferent Delhi staff, came as quite a surprise to me. And, on our way out, just I was beginning to credit their courteousness to the high values imbibed in the culture, I was brought back to reality by their hollering demands of 'chai-paani' ....Welcome to Hyderabad!

OVer the next 2 days, we travelled across the twins cities of hyderabad & secundarabad, escorted by our friend who turned out to be a perfectly delighful hostess , meeting with even the most ridiculous demands we could make in two days, from wanting to see everything that was something to be seen to the crazy shopping. Not-to-mention, ofcourse, the fanatic photography I am so addicted to!

After landing in hyderabad, our first stop was Indian School of Business, where a friend studies. Located in GachhiBowli, the campus is next to the campuses of Infosys & Microsoft and is huge by all proportions. All the buildings including the main college, the student villages, & the recreation center are circumscribed with lush greenery. The hyderabad dry heat made it impossible for us to walk around for long , but we did have lunch in the ISB mess and later coffee in the canteen. Some quick snaps, congratulations on the graduation of our friend, and we were off to our next destination, Salarjung museum.

We reached there in about 30 odd minutes, in an auto, only to find a closed-on-fridays board hanging at the front gate.

Oh well! we did not have time to waste moping , so we took the same auto and rushed off to chaar-minaar. The oldest, most famous landmark of Hyderabad. Standing in the heart of the busiest market of hyderabad, the building has clocks on all of its sides, which actually tell correct time! :) At Rs5/- per head, we took tickets to climb up this ancient monument. A steep narrow spiral staircase one in each of the minaars, is what leads people upstairs, and currently, thanks to sheer governmental neglect & the lack of respect by the civilians, tourists & locals alike, lies in a dilapidated, heart rending state with spit marks across the walls, & broken , dysfunctional bulbs. Finally on the top, we took a walk along the square periphery of the monument, taking in the view at each side. Not that it was very different, with busy markets and unbelievably heavy traffic everywhere :P

Walking along the interior periphery one can look down and across the monument. There are narrow domes along this path, perhaps intended for placing candles for illuminating the path. The monument is not too large in terms of area, but standing there, looking across to the other end and looking down, left me speechless for a few moments, as space n time collapsed and mental images of the sultans seemed to float into reality....

After the climb down, which was scarier the climb up, owing majorly to the steep, curved stairs, we took one last look at the minaar and proceeded to the famous chudi-bazaar, the bangle market, on one side of the minaar. A hustling busy street, laden with beautiful stone-work, and displays of excellent craftsmanship. Some tough bargaining, and quick pruchasing, where all of us ended up spending much more than we had anticipated, we took another auto to our next destination, The Golkonda Fort.

We reached there in about an hour, owing to the rush hour traffic and reached just in time for the famous Light-n-Sound show. Rs.50/- per head, if I remember correctly, and we practically ran all the way to the area where the show was actually being held. And though the run must've been atleast 1 Km, the path was well-lit & and well paved. The show lasts for about 45min-1 hr with the voices of the likes of Mr. Amitabh Bachchan & Mr. Sayed Jaffrey as the orators. The show talks of the history & the architecture of the Golkonda Fort, and is orated mainly in English, with urdu & telugu songs thrown in to add to the effects of the lights and the realistic sounds of the show. An amazing experience, and a must watch in hyderabad. The show being over, we clicked some quick snaps and regretted at not having enough time to come back the next day and take the trek across the fort.

On our way back, I started chatting casually with the auto-walah, who spoke in characteristic hyderabadi hindi, different form the telugu, urdu, and broken accented hindi and english I had heard in Hyderabad till then. Auto-rickshaws are the second most common mode of conveyance, the list topped by buses, in this city of a hilly uneven terrain and very heavy, atrocious traffic.
Many-a-times, one can see auto-rickshaws passing within centimeters of each other, especially at Panjaagutta. Panjaagutta is the central, busiest traffic junction of the city, which connects to all parts of the city and gets its name from being the meeting point of roads coming from 5-different directions. During our trip in Hyderabad, we passed this junction atleast twice everyday.

Back home, we had the famous hyderabaadi biryaani :) , both veg and chicken flavors from a place called Hyderaabaadi Biryaani House in Madhavpur. Needless to say, I am now a fan of the culinary skills of the place.

Next day was booked for a trip to Ramoji Film City. Located way off the main city, we took a package tour to Ramoji and reached in about 2 hours. Tickets, Rs. 250/- per head, at the main entrance, and we were taken inside by our tour bus, which then left us at the actual entrance of the film city with instructions to be back by 5:30 PM.

Claimed to be the biggest film city in the world, it is spread over 2000 acres of land, with 1300 acres already adorned with beautiful sets, gardens and pathways. Whether it is Delhi's Jaama Masjid, or Mughal Gardens, and right from Mysore's Vrindavan Gardens to streets of Zurich, not-to-mention broken down buildings for fight scenes and 36 different gardens, every possible set seen in any movie serial or TV show can be seen there. Built with Plaster of Paris and/or wood, the sets are re-usable and fully customisable.

We took our lunch at Chanakya restaurent, which offered amazing buffet at Rs. 99/- per head (plus a complimentary ice cream ;P ), with the dim lights & a soothing ambience providing a much needed relief from the scorching heat outside. We just relaxed for a while after lunch, and got up for the fear off actually dozing off :P

To add to the tourist attraction, there are also amusement shows, like wild-wild west, and aalampanah, the talent show, a mini-amusement park and a meena bazaar where pearls, local handicrafts and gift items can be bought at fixed prices.

The day was spent walking, snacking and trying to see everything the place has to offer! In the end we did have to miss the joy rides, owing to the non-stop snacking we had indulged in, but the farewell Bihu dance made us forget about our disappointments soon 

A quick shopping spree at the pearls market, which left all of us nearly bankrupt, ;) we ended the day with a relaxed dinner at the Eat street located at the Hussain Sagar Lake-side. Soothing weather, cool breeze, awesome view of the lake, and the necklace road, and a plethora of food options, from subway to biryaani, the street has it all.

Our last morning in Hyderabad, a quick breakfast at the open-air Barista and we were off. As the plane took off and I took one last look at the char-minaar fading away below, I knew that despite its traffic, I still enjoyed being here, and would want to come back for more….
Click here for pics

Optimizing Web Pages

Something had been nagging me for quite some time. The home page of my website took way too much time to download. And I am talking of a 100 Mbps broadband connection. Now if this was my take on the page, then the ordinary users’ reaction, with a standard 33.6 Kbps Dial-Up was definitely not going to be encouraging. So as soon as I got some time away from the client’s never ending modification requests ;). So I decided to get to the bottom of this and see if I was not being just paranoid. Here are some of the findings, (for obvious reasons I have removed the actual URLs in question)

test URL1

Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 200.10 seconds
28.8K 105.35 seconds
33.6K 91.81 seconds
56K 59.33 seconds
ISDN 128K 25.52 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 11.90 seconds
Comparing with some of our other websites,
test URL2

Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 91.80 seconds
28.8K 50.80 seconds
33.6K 44.94 seconds
56K 30.89 seconds
ISDN 128K 16.26 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 10.36 seconds

test URL3

Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 137.93 seconds
28.8K 70.76 seconds
33.6K 61.17 seconds
56K 38.14 seconds
ISDN 128K 14.18 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 4.52 seconds

It was time to get things in action. I dug up some material on the net. Most of the things I found were not news to me, and the rest seemed like plain common sense. And yet it was surprising how trying to meet impossible deadlines and keeping the clients happy, they had been conveniently forgotten, by me of course: P, during the development phase.

Well below is a small summary of the tips I found useful, followed by the respective links.

The basic idea is to
1) Reduce the number of bytes being transferred over the net
2) Reduce the number of individual HTTP requests per page load and
3) Increase the number of concurrent HTTP requests by spreading out content on multiple servers

• Page Layout and Size
o 30K – the ideal maximum size for your Web page,
o 12K the ideal maximum size for each image, sound file, or applet This includes animated images and anything downloaded with the page
o Use multiple pages Instead of one long page
o Use special effects sparingly Make sure that the site needs the effect you want. Whenever you add Java or JavaScript or other effects, it impacts the download time of your site.
o Use CSS for layouts instead of Nested tables - Normally, when a page loads the browser starts at the top of the HTML and loads it sequentially down the page. However, with nested tables, it has to find the end of the table before it can display the entire thing. Also, if you're trying to write valid XHTML, tables should not be used for layout at all. Tables are for tabular data (such as spreadsheets) not for layout. Instead you should use CSS for layout - this renders more quickly and creates valid XHTML.
o A table will load more quickly if each row is a separate table, because the browser would render the first table and then render the second.
• External Objects
o Use external stylesheets and Javascript files wherever possible. Since once they are downloaded, they will be cached by the browser, and the subsequent downloads will be much faster. For this, however, you must include the stylesheets and javascript files in the head part of the HTML page, instead of the body. Also, allow static images, stylesheets, and javascript to be unconditionally cached by the browser.
o Consider evenly spreading uncache-able objects over multiple hostnames, thereby allowing for more concurrent HTTP connections.
o Load fewer external objects. Due to request overhead, one bigger file just loads faster than two smaller ones half its size.
o Turn on HTTP keepalives for external objects
o Set an Expires header on everything you can, with a date days or even months into the future thereby reducing unnecessary HTTP requests for validating the cached content
• Using CSS effectively
o Use contextual selectors
Instead of assigning a value to each individual paragraph, we can nest them within a <div> tag and assign a value to this tag:
o Use shorthand CSS properties
You can use the following shorthand properties for the margin CSS command.
Use:
margin: 2px 1px 3px 4px (top, right, bottom, left)
...instead of
margin-top: 2px;
margin-right: 1px;
margin-bottom: 3px;
margin-left: 4px
o Use relative call-ups
Try to avoid absolute call ups as they take up more space. An example of an absolute call up is: <a href="http://www.URL.com/filename.htm">. Much better would be code><a href="filename.htm">. But what if some files are in different folders to other ones? Use these shorthand properties:

• <a href="/"> - Calls up http://www.URL.com


• <a href="/filename.html"> - Calls up http://www.URL.com/filename.html



• <a href="/directory/filename.html"> - Calls up http://www.URL.com/directory/filename.html


• <a href="./"> - Calls up index.html within that directory


• <a href="../"> - Calls up index.html one directory above



• <a href="../filename.html"> - Calls up filename.html one directory above


• <a href="../../"> - Calls up index.html two directories above

o Remove unnecessary META tags and META content
Most META tags are pretty much unnecessary and don't achieve very much.
o Use / at the end of directory links
Don't do this: <a href="http://www.URL.com/directoryname">
Do this instead: <a href="http://www.URL.com/directoryname/">
The presence of the slash "\" at the end woluld tell the browser that the destination is a directory which, the browser would otherwise have to find out for itself.
• Optimize GIFs
o Make sure that only the relevant parts are in the image. Cropping can make your Web image smaller both in dimensions and download size.
o Saving a three color file as a 256-color indexed GIF will increase the size. When saving as a GIF, it's a good idea to convert the image first to Web colors (if you're using Photoshop, choose the image mode, indexed, and then choose Web colors). This will make sure that the colors won't dither on the Web. Then convert the image to the least number of colors it can use and still look correct.
o GIF images use an index of colors for the image, colors that are not used in the image, don't need to be included in the index.
• Remove Extra whitespaces
o Remove multiple carriage returns
o Close tags on the same line you open them on
o Keep related block items on the same line For example, paragraph tags or table cell tags should be on the same line as their contents,
o Indent using spaces And only use one space for each indent. You get the same effect, and use less whitespace.
• Use Google's Load Time Analyzer extension for Firefox from a realistic net connection to see a graphical timeline of what it is doing during a page load.

(..Excerpts from)

Webdesign/Speed
Webdesign/Optimizing Images
Musings
Webdesign/Tips

WHAM!! WHAM!! THUD!! THUD!! Dear God!! My head hurt so much it was almost as if the
splitting sounds were coming from the outside. And they kept coming closer. Oh NO! Wait! They WERE coming from the outside. I looked up to realise there was cabling
work going on right at my desk. "Madam, can you please move outside, we need to move
your table and finish the cabling" .... I reluctantly got up from my seat where I
had put my head-down on my arms and closed my eyes, trying to shut out the noise. I
left to see if the coffee machine had been set up. I badly needed a cup. We had just
moved into our new office and it was the first day. The move was from a semi-
deconstructed to a semi-constructed office and life , as can be expected, was
chaotic, and I am not talking about just work. Scattered furniture, half-laid
cables, and non-stop hammering & drilling everywhere. I hadn't had a coffee since I
arrived 4 hours ago, and the drill machines had given me a splitting headache.It was
a nightmare. At last I found the coffee machine, and realised once again, how
heavenly a cup of coffee could be. :) Refreshed after that short break, I finally
forced myself to look around the place. And realised that it was not only bigger but
also much much nicer. Loads of windows everywhere, and a lot of moving space. The
view outside the windows was nothing spectacular, but I could see till far-off,
trees, mingled with single storey buildings, the perfect blue skies and the cool
wind on the perfect March afternoon. It was actually a nice place. The next day was etter, we even had a small ganpati-pooja, completely in-house ofcourse ;) and after we had finally managed to drag our CEO out of his non-stop meetings and embarrassed him visibly ;). This followed a samosa-party , well no celebration is ever complete without a samosa-jalebi party rt!! ;)
Its been a week. The drill machines are still on. But the cabling around my desk is done atleast ;) And, things are settling down.
Infosys founder said in a mecture, "Love your job, not your company" , I dont think thats possible. I dont think you can enjoy your work, unless you like the sorroundings, the ergonomics and the people you work with. Its the whole picture that can be viewed and taken in totality. Maybe that, or maybe I am too retarded to understand that :P
Well, its a saturday afternoon, and part-of-why I am still sitting in my office is because slowly, but surely, I am falling in love with it, all of it :)

shit! no1 agrees i shud be in s/w

not even my own intelligence ... :P

Your Dominant Intelligence is Interpersonal Intelligence

You shine in your ability to realate to and understand others. Good at seeing others' points of view, you get how people think and feel. You have an uncanny ability to sense true feelings, intentions, and motivations. A natural born leader, you are great at teaching and mediating conflict. You would make a good counselor, salesperson, politician, or business person.

What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?

hmm....maybe i should finally talk to my parents.... ;)

i am thai...

.... food i.e. atleast thts wat the results say :P

You Are Thai Food

Trendy yet complex. People seek you out - though they're not sure why.

What Kind of Food Are You?

and come to think of it, i dont even like thai food ;-??