Musings

Well, past 2 months have been nothing more than a rigmarole and blogging took a back seat. Let me resume the blog post with some amusing things that happened over the past 2 months..

Ok, we are just about getting ready for the much awaited VQManager 6.0 release. I just can't hold it longer for pushing this out in open. There are already some pressure from our prospects and customers to get a hand on this new release. Things are converging fast and we are working on the last minute issues and glitches. I'm just hoping that all things fall in place and we make the release by early next week. I have few other things to get on with from the next week. So getting this done earlier is a big premium for me.

There has been this interesting debate going on in the media upon the conclusion of the India-England Test Series. Should Rahul Dravid have enforced follow-on with a 319 run first innings lead? At an hindsight, every body becomes a expert. People talk about being aggressive, bringing the opposition to the knees etc., and enforce the follow-on. I have a different take on this though. In fact, I stand by the decision of the captain in this regard. More often than not, these decisions are instinctive (and at times decided in the team meetings!) in nature. The way Indian bowlers bowled in the first innings, one must admit, wasn't very encouraging. They, especially the seamers, were just spraying the balls around and in most cases the English batsmen got themselves out rather than the bowlers getting the wicket. Even the great Anil Kumble wasn't a big threat in the first innings. The fielders did drop few catches too. Taking all these into account, it is fair on Dravid's part to

Well, some news on the VQManager.. These are quite exciting days of development on the VQManager. The Beta release, which has the Cisco Skinny protocol support, has been a big hit now. There are lot more leads/prospects for this new beta than the existing VQManager 5.2. This is, in a way, what was expected. Going by the interest shown in the recently concluded Cisco Networkers show, I'm all the more optimistic and excited about this new releases. We have added lot of cool new UIs and major performance boost to the system, it should be a BIG hit with the users. One of the major enhancements includes the UI performance improvements. The pages now loads lightning fast and it does provide a very good feeling using the product. These are the last few stages of the development and we have to undergo the painful rigmarole of validate, prioritize and bug-fix cycle. This is a inevitable, painful cycle for any product release. But this is the MOST important phase of the release cycle too. Th

'We got out of jail'... this was the sentence muttered by Rahul Dravid, the Indian cricket captain after the First test match between India and England ended in a draw. I think it pretty much sums up the mood in the Indian camp. It was quite unpleasant to see the Indian players look skywards during the course of the match, literally praying for the rain to come down! In a way, I would say it was a 'strategy' to play until the rains came down and force a draw. With only the last wicket standing, it was impossible for the team to go for a win or even hope to play out the day. What do I take from this match? Well, for one, this test match exposed the Indian batsmen against the swing bowling. All the 'famous' quartret of Rahul, Sachin, Saurav and VVS were found wanting against a second stream England bowlers. Neither the pitch nor the conditions or the bowlers were anywhere close to threatening the batsmen. It was purely their minds that played havoc in the middle.

One of the interesting issues that I have resolved of late has been making the VQManager work in the Virtual Ethernet environment. For starters, the VQManager is a sniffing based application that relies on the packet capture functionality of the underlying kernel. Typically the VQManager sniffs ethernet packets, decodes them. The sniffed packet follows the order of Ethernet headers->Ip Headers -> UDP Header -> Payload (SIP/RTP etc.,). But in a Virtual ethernet, this packet format is a bit different. A Virtual Ethernet, as the name suggests is a virtual interface of the computer. Typical virtualization softwares (like VMware, OpenVZ, Virtuzzo etc.,) provides these options. Ie., the applications are NOT exposed to the 'real' Ethernet but a 'virtual' layer on top of that. Now, why did this Virtual Ethernet thing create issues with VQManager? Well, as mentioned earlier, the VQManager expects the packet to be of the order. In a virtual ethernet environment, the Eth

What gives you pleasure from product development is that many people are finding it useful. In fact, that gives greater satisfaction than, say, solving the most complex technical puzzle in the product itself. There have been many instances of VQManager being used and it was always from our known customers (people who have bought it!). So, it was a pleasant surprise to see some one mentioning the product in an external forum . Hope to hear more such news from our users! Btw, if you are one of them using the product and finding it useful, please share your views on the same.. You can share your feedbacks by dropping in a line to our support mail id (support [at] vqmanager [dot] com). We're quite eager to hear user feedbacks/inputs all the time!

VQManager is the product that I'm working on for my company AdventNet . Its a real time VoIP monitoring software that can 'sniff' the packets in your network and provide you with the Call quality reports et. al,. It has been quite a amazing journey for our whole team from where we started to where we are now. With lot of inputs from our users (and customers!), the product has come off well and we just might have hit the gold spot! Let me write some 'internal-news' of whats happening in our product just to keep the interest alive! You may check out the product from our website: http://www.vqmanager.com and download the same for a 30-day FREE evaluation from http://www.vqmanager.com/download.html

With the world cup debacle for India getting slowly forgotten, there is one more deamon opened up by our great coach Greg! I have admired his stern and straight forward approach to the Indian cricket. I thought he will bring in the much needed professionalism into this Indian squad. With a focus on grooming youngsters and experimentation policy India were on a high with consecutive victories (read in the subcontinent conditions !) in the initial phase of Greg's coaching. Everything seemed to have fallen into place, with the exception of the Ganguly saga, and everything looked bright for the Indian cricket team. Now then, I think everything started deteriorating after the 'disastorous' tour to West Indies where the Indians were beaten 4-1 in the ODI series. This really set the tone for the decline of the team's performance and it seems like a never ending story. It has really upset whatever plans the captain and coach had for the world cup campaign. Suddenly, all the you

As the world cup campaign for the Indian team got over last Saturday, with Bangladesh beating the Bermuda, the 'stars' are coming back home.. There has been a lot of media reports touching upon the inherent revenue loss for the broadcasters and advertisers alike due to the premature exit of the Indian team. Reports claim close to Rs. 2000 Cr of revenue loss :? Well, thats a huge sum of money to invest in a game of cricket (or any other sport for that matter) that too on a set of hugely non-performing, over-hyped players. At least, this World cup woes will set things right and bring sanity into the commercialization of the sport and the sports-person alike. I guess we may no longer see a Sachin, Dhoni, Dravid, Ganguly, Sehwag et. al., coming before us to drink a bottle of Pepsi or Boost or what not. In a way, this exit has been good to bring down the expectation of the 'Blue Billion'. One of the Economic Times article fears that the cricket tours India is to undertake co

As like many in India, I'm also a great follower of Cricket. It doesn't get bigger than a World cup. With so much of hype surrounding the MIB (not the SNMP's Management Information Base :), this stands for the Men In Blue, a term coined for Team India based on their jersey color), I was waiting for the matches. Being an ardent fan of Sachin Tendulkar, I expected fireworks from this Little Master blaster, especially with 'minnows' like Bangladesh and Bermuda around. Alas, what a disappointment! Not in my wildest dream that I imagined our favorite MIB will crash out of the first round.. The defeat against Bangladesh set the tone for the team. They never looked like willing to win the match at all. If Dravid and Co thought of just being at the park will ensure a win against the 'minnows' (read Bangladesh!), they are mightly mistaken. For the Bangladesh team had already 'upset' the strong Newzealand in the warm-up games.. and they did have a shrewd coach

Well, blogging is a new world for me.. Let me explore it and disover the trenches :)