Trek towards Sandakphu

It has been more than a month I came back from my first ever trekking experience. Last month me and my brother teamed up with 4 of my friends for this trip. Being first ever trek for most of us, we were really excited for this. Perhaps being overenthusiastic, I purchased one 65L rucksack also from UBAC and a pretty good hiking boot from Woodlands. But at the end, I think everything paid off.

We started walking from Manebhanjan on 15th August afternoon. We took a local boy 'Buddha' with us as our guide. The very first thing he told us that he was Buddha, not Buddhadeb the WB CM. Not sure if he was trying to make any political statement! Anyways, we started after covering ourselves with a plastic, as it was raining continuously. But boy! First two kms appeared to be real difficult for novices like us, particularly for me. Perhaps I should have rechecked if I could carry so heavy a backpack. Buddha came to remedy, he carried the backpack for me. We reached Chitrey in the evening and decided to stay the night there. A hotel called Hawk's Nest is available there. We kept some of ours luggage there and started trekking towards Tumbling next day morning around 8 am. We reached Tumbling at 12.30. We stayed the night at Siddartha Lodge. As Singalila National Park was closed due to the monsoon season, we decided not to proceed any further. We also had some time constraint. But next day was like a dream. I got awaken as Soumen jumped from the room, shouting sun has come out. We all came out and saw the majestic Kanchenjunga slowly revealing all its beauty. Clouds disappeared one after another. Sun brought the white icy cover to light, with all its glittering sunlight. Local people say Kanchenjunga family of hills are nothing but Lord Buddha sleeping gracefully. Close look makes the story clear. Kanchenjunga does look like a man sleeping in the eternity. After taking lunch we started trekking again. This was very short. We reached Tonglu in almost 2 hours. It started raining again. We stayed another night at the Trekkers Hut in Tonglu. Buddha went downhill to get some chicken for us. This was another good thing about our trip: we never compromised about our food! Next day, we started in the morning and reached Chitrey around 12'o clock. We took our lunch there and started the return journey. With help of Buddha we contacted a person at Manebhanjan, who is popularly called as "Masterjee". Though we did not meet him, but he arranged a car for us.

The trek was difficult sometime. But we really enjoyed the trip. Whereas it is impossible for me to describe how it was in the hill, but let me just put few of the snaps taken by my friends.

Kanchenjunga

Picture Perfect

Few things which I found important for a novice trekker like me:

1. Do a reality check, can you really trek? Don't just get carried away by what your friends say.
2. Make sure you are not carrying anything redundant. Make your backpack as less as possible.
3. Avoid shorter but difficult routes. Let it take some more time.
4. Take a guide.
5. Most importantly, you need a fit and strong health to trek.
   

(useless) Stopwatch!

While reading this cheat sheet, I found a new stopwatch tool today. From your shell, you just run `time cat` to start the stopwatch. Once you are done, stop the clock by CTRL-D. Maybe it is not that useful, but I find it cool! It is geeky!

Head first

This post is about Head First JSP Servlet book. This is not a review, just my experience.

Recently I felt the urge to learn some jsp/servlet. Though I have worked on jsps and servlets for quite a few months, but I never knew why I wrote any particular jsp code. If something didn't work, I'd google and find a work around and copy the code snippet. And, as long as it worked, I felt ok, my boss felt ok since that is what matters for business: whatever mess it is, it should work! But couple of weeks back I thought of reassessing myself. I had to pity myself for all my ignorance :( So that was the reason I felt the need to earn some jsp expertise. (Maybe this itself can make another post)

I was aware of Head First books. Looking at those books, It never appeared to be technically serious to me. But being one of Kathy Sierra fan (too bad that she had to stop blogging), I thought of giving a try. OMG! I finished that within two weeks. I never expected a technical book to be so engaging. It is one of the books, I enjoyed most. It's fun from first to last page. Can you believe you get to read F-word in a jsp book! And that too with an explanation why F-word is not bad always. I really liked the book, and also I believe I learned quite a few things from it. Only thing what I felt, as a reference this book may not be appropriate, but for learning this is the book to go for!

Reading Anandabazar on linux

I am using Linux seriously for last four years. One of the things I wanted to do on linux from the very beginning is to read my favourite bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika. I tried a lot, but my all efforts went in vein vain. People told me that you can not read Anandabazar on linux due to some font issues :(. But recently with help from Kolkata-Lug I got a work around by which I can read my favorite daily on linux. In this post, I try to give a how-to kinda description of what you need to do to read Anandabazar on linux.

First thing you need is an unicode enabled browser. And firefox is one such browser. But problem is indic scripts don't get rendered properly with firefox. To view indic scripts in firefox you need to use a different rendering engine, called pango. The default download version available on mozilla site is not built with pango. So with that version, you can't view indic scripts properly.

There are two ways to get firefox built with pango. Binaries available in fedora or ubuntu repositories are built with pango. So if you use these two distros and install firefox using yum or apt-get then chances are you'll get a pango enabled firefox. Other option is to build firefox from source yourself, though I don't have any clue on this. To check if your firefox has pango built in, input 'about:buildconfig' in your firefox address bar. Look for '--enable-pango' in configure arguments. If you see one such phrase, then you can be sure that your firefox has pango built in.

Next, you need an Unicode Bangla Font. Ankur has a good mini and precise how-to for installing Bangla fonts. But, I was not able to install the rpm from that site due to some dependency problem. So I had to opt for the good old tgz packages. The instructions are given there, and they are very straight forward indeed.

With this settings, you will be able to view most bengali sites. But unfortunately there are some *stupid* websites who don't like to follow the font specifications. They use their in-house proprietary set of fonts. Anandabazar is one among them. To get rid of this comes Padma, yet another firefox extension. Padma automatically transforms web pages that use the specified dynamic font schemes (Anandabazar is one among them) to Unicode. And once you have the unicodes, firefox is able to render them.

I was so happy to read 'Golmele Ginni' after so many days ;-)

Note: All these were done on a CentOS release 4.1 (Final) and Firefox 1.5.0.10.

India goes boom!

Few days back I dreamt of watching men in blue marching victory lap in WC final. But after Lankan riots, I dare to stick to my dream. Like loads of poor Indians, today I was also praying for Bermuda thrashing Bangladesh. But they are limping at 45 for 4 in a rainy ODI. Thing is WC is over for India this time. I curse myself for purchasing a tv only to see this to happen.

In spite of having so many *so called great* players in the side, such a fortune is really disappointing. People are saying we lacked commitment, we lacked passion and blah blah... But I think we are simply not good enough. In spite of having likes of sachin-dravid-saurav-kumble around for so many years, how many times have we performed really like a world class team? It's just occasional spark of genius, that own India some matches. And those very few occasions have been blown out of proportions really badly. So badly, that we started believing in non-existing abilities of our players. I think time has come for an honest investigation.

I think our senior players should take the responsibility and step down now. Report tells me sachin wants to play in the next WC also! wtf! Of course he can improve his personal records, but no way it's going to help indian cricket. We need new -N-fresh blood in the squad. May be likes of rainas, uthappas did not work, but some more efforts can unearth some real champion. Let us be optimistic..

Having said all that, I believe my fellow country men should stop behaving like a fanatic now. I don't understand what-the-hell you get attacking a player's house after his failure? Please stop these non-senses of physical harassment. Unless we mature as a nation, we don't have any hope either in cricket or in any other games.