Bengaluru Metro Privacy Policy

TLDR; We do not collect any data from you and do not take responsibility for any loss you incur by using the "Bengaluru Metro" application. You have your privacy guaranteed. If you like the application, please rate it on the AppStore, feedback is always welcome. Be courteous while criticizing :)

This Privacy Policy governs the use of the software application Bengaluru Metro ("Applicatoin") for iOS devices that was created by Manjunath Iyer Basaralu Srinivasa. The application is intended to provide commuters a schedule for the Bengaluru's Namma Metro. However, this application is not officially endorsed or associated with BMRCL in any capacity. The schedule here is based on the information provided in BMRCL's website (http://english.bmrc.co.in/TravelInfos) and the developer's experience traveling across the two lines for the duration between individual stations. The schedule is available only for weekdays. Weekend schedule is not available on BMRCL's website and hence is not included in the app. The app does not consider real time changes in schedule or any recent changes that have not been updated in the website yet. Always arrive few minutes in advance to board a train and allow sufficient time for security checks and passing through the gates after purchasing your ticket. As advised in BMRCL's website, gates close 15 minutes prior to the last trip. 

The developer does not assume any liabilities for any incidents or damages that happens to the user for using the application. 

What information does the Application obtain and how is it used?

As such, the developer does not collect any information about the user or user's device and usage patterns. All the info the develop has is what Apple provides by default in the App store analytics and that's the end of it. 

Does the Application collect precise real time location information of the device?

No. This application does not collect precise real time location information from the device.

Do third parties see and/or have access to information obtained by the Application?

Ideally, No. We do not have any of your information to provide to third parties. 

What are my opt-out rights?

Really? What do you want to opt-out of when we do not collect any data?

You can uninstall the application if you don't like us not collecting your data. 

Data Retention Policy, Managing Your Information

No user data is collected or retained. 

Children

Free to use by anyone. No information about anyone collected or retained. 

Security

The application does not have anything that is so secure. And we do not have any data that is to be secured. 

Changes

This privacy policy may be updated from time to time for any reason. We will notify everyone by updating the privacy policy at https://basaralu.blogspot.com/2017/11/nammametro-privacy-policy.html. You are advised to consult this privacy policy regularly for any changes, as continued use is deemed approval of all changes. 

Your Consent

By using the Application, you are consenting to our processing of your information as set forth in this Privacy Policy now and as amended by us. "Processing,” means using cookies on a computer/hand held device or using or touching information in any way, including, but not limited to, collecting, storing, deleting, using, combining and disclosing information, all of which activities will take place in the state of California. 

Contact us

If you have any questions regarding privacy while using the Application, or have questions about our practices, please contact us via email at nammabengalurumetro@gmail.com

Build or install git from source on Mac OS X

In the last 6 months, out of many new things I've tried, building git has been quite an interesting one.  Steve Streeting's blog post was the primary reference for this activity. 

As Steve rightly mentions, it is important that you install command line tools for XCode before attempting to build. Run this in terminal to install Xcode command line tools. 

xcode-select --install 

Clone the source code of git from  https://github.com/git/git/ 

You need to select the right tag of the version which you need to build and checkout the tag. 

If you have not used homebrew before, its time for you to install homebrew. Learn more about Homebrew. Run this in terminal to install homebrew,

usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Why do you need Homebrew? 

Well, Homebrew is a package manager for Mac and will help you install some missing packages here. Want to know more about Homebrew? Check this out - http://brew.sh

Next up, OS 10.11 SDK does not include OpenSSL. You need to install this using brew. To do so, run this in terminal,

brew install openssl

If you want to install git in a specific location, make sure you set the right path before building. And to do so, you may need autoconf. If you do not have autoconf installed, you can do so by running this in terminal,

brew install autoconf 

You can now set the path for the build products by running, 

./configure --prefix=<path_to_build>

Now, you are ready to build git from the source code. Run this variant of make to build and install git,

NO_GETTEXT=1 make NO_INSTALL_HARDLINKS=1 CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib" install

You should now be able to find the git build in the path you've specified. However, there are a few things still missing. You'll need to install git-subtree which can be found in git's source. Navigate to "git/contrib/subtree" and run this command to install git-subtree,

sudo make install

Finally, make sure you have the git's credential helper in place. This is also found in the source. Navigate to "git/contrib/credential/osxkeychain/" and run "make" in terminal to get an executable. Move this executable to the build path under "bin" folder. 

The build products are now ready to be used. You can check the version by running this in terminal,

<path_to_build>/bin/git --version

Hope this helps some one. 

References: 

http://www.stevestreeting.com/2016/02/11/building-git-from-source-on-el-capitan-os-x-10-11/

https://engineeredweb.com/blog/how-to-install-git-subtree/

Off-beat LA destinations during 4th of July 2014

It was just about 15 days since a colleague of mine had come to the US in 2014. It was the weekend of July 4th and we planned to go to Los Angeles. However, we did not want to visit the typical Hollywood, Universal Studios or Disney where it would all be very crowded. We were joined by my friend my Sacramento, Anup and Madhunkiran on the road from Sacramento. Madhukiran had earlier flown from NYC to Sacramento. We also had my cousin Prasanna joining us on this trip.

Anup and Madhu rented a Toyota Avalon from Sacramento and arrived here at about 5 PM and we then went to the airport at San Jose to add ourselves as drivers on the rental. We started from there at about 6:30 PM on our journey to LA. We stopped at Denny's on the way for dinner and reached our hotel late night. Denny's is one of our typical dinner stops on trips like this.

The next morning, we were all excited to go on a Segway tour at Huntington beach. We had bought a deal on Living Social for this and worked out pretty well. It was a 2 hour Segway tour for $36 per person. It took all of us a while to know how to use it and how it works. While, Prasanna and Madhu learnt it pretty quick, Anup took the most time and was very scared of riding it all through the tour. This was our first experience on Segway and all of us enjoyed it.

Guru and Madhu trying Segway at the rental

All of us on the Segway

We had lunch at an Indian Restaurant that afternoon along with an ex-collegue Sushma who was at LA for the last 2+ years doing her masters and now working there. Its been so long now that I don't remember the name of the restaurant. But, it was a long wait for the buffet lunch and all of us were so hungry. The food was pretty good and we were glad to have Idly and Vada in the buffet. We later had Crushed Ice with mango flavor (called Gola or Ice-gola in India) nearby and headed to the beach at Santa Monica. Unable to find a proper parking, we parked our car on the street and went to the beach and played until we were tired for the next few hours. This was the most crazy time we ever had in the beach till date. From jumping on the waves to literally pulling legs of each other to bring them down, we had great fun. After the beach, we drove about an hour before having dinner at Islands Burgers. We then went into Target and bought food and other supplies we might need for the hiking we had planned for the next day. Checking in to the hotel, we took a shower and hit the bed for the day. 

The next morning, we were supposed to start early in the morning to take the Island Packers Cruise to Channel Islands National Park off the coast of Ventura. Though most of us were ready, we got slightly delayed and had to rush to make sure we reached in time. We eventually reached a little late. Since the reservation was confirmed and we had called the cruise folks a couple of times, they had delayed boarding and we could make it to the cruise. It was an hour ride on the cruise with amazing views and dolphin showing up often besides the boat. 

Boarding the cruise

Dolphins enroute Channel Islands

First glimpse of Channel Islands at a distance in the fog

Views closer to the shores

As soon as we landed on the shore, we had a ranger who gave as instructions on the various trails available for hike, their distances and a strict no trash policy of the island. We also got flyers with these details. We took one of the loops which was about 8 miles and started after eating some fruits. It was a fun filled tiring hike and we had some amazing view of the ocean from the top of the hills on the island. 

Anup walking away from us to avoid our poor jokes

Tired folks on the hike

Ocean views from the top

More ocean views

Ocean views again

Atop the mountain

A standard jump pose we always try

This place is totally isolated and does not have any source of food or potable water. So, it is very important to carry everything beforehand and this is why helped us survive the day here. Water is very very important. It was very hot in July when we went and though we had a good number of water bottles, we felt it was short. We found another big Indian telugu family who were so well prepared that they brought Puliyogre and Curd rice for their group of about 15 people. We had fruits, donuts, trail-mix and lots of junk food on which we survived. When we returned back to the entrance of the island, we were so tired that we tried to get into the water of a small beach. However, we couldn't stay longer in the water because of the strong waves and small stones which would hit us on the foot making it very difficult to stand in the water. We did rest there for about an hour before we could get back on the cruise to return to Ventura. We did spot a surprise guest - Mr. Fox before we left Channel Island to make it even more memorable. 

Closest encounter with a fox

Human response and influence of others and social media on it.

In the last few weeks, I was wondering what to write here. My first thought was to write about all the travel I've done in the US in the last 23 months. However, that would need quite some preparation and collection of pictures. While I prepare for the travel stories, I felt I should start writing something and that's when I remembered a strange and quite an embarrassing incident which happened a couple of months ago. Hold on! I still am not sure who got embarrassed with it. However, I just want to narrate the incident from my perspective and am not intending to find out any answers for anything. If for any reason someone relates it to themselves or someone they know, it may not be a coincidence. It is just my honest opinion..! 

Lets get to the point. A good friend of mine, let me call this friend as Patricia had been to Europe for a conference of a renowned pharmaceutical company and I was very happy for that. 

Well, lets get back to get a background, Patricia studied medicine and was a highly energetic, knowledgable and a real fun person to be with. We were good friends and always had many things to discuss in common. I, being an engineer in electronics and interested in medical electronics had many things to know from Patricia and vice-versa. We always shared these common talks and enjoyed it. Well, at least I definitely enjoyed it. 

Lets get back to the Europe conference. I was really very happy that she successfully toured Europe and learnt a lot of new things and was keen to know how it went after seeings some posts on Facebook. I did post a comment on one of those posts, which I think read something like "Is there a blogpost or something to know more about what all you learnt and how your entire trip was?". I knew that she had a blog which she was using for a few other things. She was a great artist too. She painted on pots (I have one of those at home as a gift) and made ear rings for girls from paper. She of course was a multi talented and I appreciated her artwork. She used to blog about her art and my expectation was that she would blog about her trip too. My comment was to know if there was a post which I could read. I got back to my work after this.

It wasn't too long before I noticed a notification on my phone that there was a reply to comment on this post. I was quite free this day and was quick on check this reply which read something like "why don't I come to your home and give you a session" (may not be exact words, but meant pretty much the same). My first and only impression reading that was she is just making fun and being jovial. So, I responded saying "Well, I don't mind if you are booking your flights to US for this. I will be happy to host you at my home." (Again, may not be exact words.) This was again just for fun and an invitation to visit US. 

This time, even before I could close Facebook window, I get a ping on messenger from Patricia saying that I was being rude. I did not understand what was rude. Anyways, I just laughed and asked her how she was. She said she was that sorry if her posts hurt me. Again, I did not understand what she saying. The next thing I said was that I'll take the comments off and was sorry if she felt it offensive. At this point of time, I felt a little embarrassed myself and did not want to take this any further. Rather than embarrassing someone I felt its better I keep myself confused and a little embarrassed. All that I could understand from the conversation is, some friends asked her if I was her enemy and she got offended of my post because of that. 

Thinking of this, I did not understand whether my comment offended this person or some one else asking about my comment. Having had such good regards and respect, I was very surprised by this response and had never expected it from Patricia. Was this a change in the thinking of Patricia over a period of time, or the influence of others, or the whole idea of this being public (impact of social media). 

Whatever was the reason, I learnt something from all this. "Check what you post on someone else's personal page." Human behavior/response is something very unpredictable. Even when you are at your best of being genuine and just being funny, you can get pretty unexpected responses. 

At the end of the day, you just have to forget it and move on!! 

"Everything seems rather absurd one or the other day and you'll laugh about it."

Nostalgic

I must admit that its been a very very long gap since the last post. Well, I've always been thinking of writing but never did. Why? I don't have an answer. In fact its been the same number or years since I had even logged into the blogger account on google. When I finally did today, I see that couple of posts are in draft. I don't even remember when I started writing them and why all of a sudden I just vanished. Just looking at the dates, I can guess that it was my peak time at work. I very well remember slogging at the Mission Road office of Exilant Technologies. And the surprising thing, even today I feel I enjoyed it. Late nights, leaving office at 3 AM and getting back by 10 AM was not unusual to me. I never felt that I was being stressed out or even a bit bad about it. But, there was huge pressure at home. When the rest of the world gets home early, why the hell does it take you so late to get back home. The earliest I would reach home was by 10:00 PM and get back to work after dinner. There were days when my mother used to get so angry with me that she would curse my company so much.
Those days are long gone now.
I'm now living in California and work at Atlassian Inc, at San Francisco.

But, I still have a lot of memories from the past years!! Feeling Nostalgic and laughing at silly little things, big disasters and the happy moments so far!

Lets get things rolling on this note!

Feels good to be writing again :-)

DREAM - FEW FRIENDS OF MINE WOULD CALL IT HEIGHTS OF ADDICTION TO WORK!!

Information to be known to the reader before going to the dream.

1. Our team at office has been working on weekends since the last 4 months.

2. The tool we develop is called a Nest (Name changed due to confidentiality policies).

3. Nest is a place to house bugs.

With these information before hand, i'll come to the day i had before the night of the dream.

It was sometime last week, i'm sorry i do not remember dates and numbers most of the times, the day started as usual at office. There were not many issues in my bucket to resolve when i had started the day. But as the day progressed, issues started pouring in. And i started resolving them one by one. By evening i received my new laptop. Which was gives so that i can resolve any critical issues from home too.

I was able to resolve some 3-4 issues by the end of the day and i still had some 5 bugs in the bucket still pending. Among these bugs, one was of a Crash. This was a show stopper. P1 bug in specific. To be resolved at the earliest. The analysis for this bug had consumed considerable amount of my time in the day. And i still had not figured out the cause for it.

I was still worried about this issue when i had left office sometime at 8:30 PM, not very late though. I thought of it all the way till home while riding my bike, as to what all possible causes might lead to this crash.

Finally i reached home with a kind of complicated mind set. I never knew the reason for this complication. I was tired and i had my dinner. And after some time in front if TV i just slept. 

I usually have a tendency to sleep in just a few minutes from the time i lie down on bed. Everything was normal that day, and i did have a sound sleep. 

People may say they had a dream in the mid night, early in the morning, blah blah blah. But i seriously do not remember when the dream started. One reason for this might be that i rarely get a dream in the night. I only dream about dreams in the day!! :P And even if there was any dream when i was asleep i would not remember any of them by the time i wake up the next morning. This was an exception that i did remember what i had dreamt  of. If not the entire dream, some part of the it at least. Anyways i did not see any clock showing time in the dream to have remembered when it was. :P:P

The best thing of the dream was that i found myself sleeping even in my dream.. :) As always i was in a sound sleep. Free of thoughts, sleeping on my bed in my 9' X 12' room. Actually quite big, spacious and more than sufficient for a single person. I had kept my bag on the table which is just a hand away from my bed. I was awaken by some movement and sound in this bag, which supposedly had the new laptop. I found something moving inside the bag. I moved a little closer to the bag to investigate what it was. 

It was very dark and there was no special sound effects as seen in movies, the sssshhhhhhhh, leaves of trees (all of them dry) flying in a direction with approximately 50KM/hour speed.;) But there were street dogs barking outside the house (there are 3 dogs in the street which do bark at any point of the day whenever they are awake). I slowly opened a the zip of the bag, only a small portion of it sufficient enough to see what was inside. 

Any wild guess what could be inside??

Well, even before i peeped in to see what was inside, there was a King Cobra peeping out, looking out for me.........!!!!!!!!!!!!

All the bugs assigned to me had converted into snakes inside the bag. 5 of them, of different types based on the priority and classification of bugs (different classification - Crash, Serious Bug, Other Bug, UI, Performance. Priority - max 1 to min 5). This King Cobra was the Crash bug with P1. And there were other snakes like the Python, Viper, Rattle Snake, etc. 

The King Cobra was trying to put in more fear into me about the itself (Crash Bug). 

Fortunately , my reaction was very brave..! I just warned the King Cobra to shut everything possible and go inside the bag and stay quite failing which i would cut it into pieces and serve the Chinese with some delicious Snake salad, snake pickle , Snake noodles and whatever dish was possible out of it.

This is all that i remember about my dream!! :(

But the next day, i was able to fix this King Cobra, i mean the Crash in just 30 minutes. All the analysis i had done had given me great results. And i was just happy for this.. :)

I need to thank a few of my colleagues who actually have similar strange imagination. And may be it was courtesy: people around me during the breaks that i had this dream. Unfortunately, I cannot name them here. 

Anyways THANKS EVERYONE!! :)

For the innovative thinking and imagination i have acquired as a result of the great company i have..! :)

Back to Blogs

I'm back....!!!


Oops!!! Whats this statement??
Isn't this a new blog??

Yes it is..
But this is my second blog!!
So the statement.. ;)

But why is it saying "I'm back"??

Its because my first blog - abhuyanta-prakrit.blogspot.com is no longer available.
And i had taken a long break from blogging, after having scrapped the earlier blog..

Now, I'm back!!!!

Watch out for more posts in the coming days!! :)