Musings

Terrorism. This is the latest menace that is hurting India now. Just taking stock of the events that happened over this year, it gives a clue on how entrenched terrorism has become in this part of the world. According to me, terrorism has no caste, religion or any other 'community' association, it is quite far from that. The only intention is to menace people into insecurity. ie., there are no 'Islamic terrorist' or 'Hindu terrorist', they are just merely 'terrorist'. Btw, what do these terrorist want by killing tens or hundreds of innocents? What is the point they are trying to prove? If their sole aim is to divide the India, the country, into pieces, what DO THEY GET out of it? What is hurting me more than the terror exploits is the petty politics that our political leaders are playing. After every blast, the opposition party (BJP) says the same stuff (UPA government is ineffective in handling terrorism.. blah blah) and the ruling party comes up with i...

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...