10 Years of 'vyaskartik2001'

The year was 2001 and I had given my 10^th standard board exams. There is a 4 month vacation after that if I remember correctly. Well I would have played hell lotta cricket for sure, but there is something else as well which happened in the year 2001….ten years ago.

Internet was kinda novelty thing and not everyone was online, atleast not even half of what it is today! Damn I didn’t even had a rig that time.  I wanted to learn a few things and I used to go to the nearby cyber café. I still remember my first date with internet.

Yahoo was the buzz at that time, Google was not that big I believe.  I went to the café and asked the guy there to help me create an email account on yahoo and rediff. First I went for rediff…had to create a username, tried kartikvyas..booked…vyaskartik…booked.  Then I went crazy and made the id myheartwillgoonkartik@rediffmail.com ……lol another one was borntowin@hotmail.com  . I don’t use these two anymore. For Yahoo, I used vyaskartik2001@yahoo.com ,that somehow stuck and I still use vyaskartik2001 to create email accounts J

A lot has happened in these 10 years.  To the internet, to me and to me with respect to the internet…hehe. Those were the days of yahoo chat rooms, I remember having made 122 friends in the yahoo messenger.  asl pls is how it used to start…hehe.Now I don't even used Yahoo, Google is my life now! I hope to work there some day! 

The results of 10^th grade came, I scored a very good 81%, damn I had slogged a lot too! After that I did two years of junior college in science stream. Still continuing with the Yahoo messenger and hell I also gave the IIT-JEE!

Remember the SP classes which I had joined, I was in the vocational batch. It implies all super scholy people who had taken vocational subjects…I was a rare breed there with Biology. I always believe studyin or working with people who are better than you is good for you!

Did my Computer Engineering after that. That was the time when my interest for Computers grew a lot. Used to read a lotta magazines in the library like Digit, Electronics for You and Linux. I used to be one of the few whi used to be there in the library most of the time. Yes even now, even in Infy..I spent lotta time in the library. I somehow feel very comfortable and happy in between hundreds and thousands of books.

I did my Engineering and got an oncampus job at Infosys.  The period at Infosys has made me what I am today.  2 blogs, 1 review site and 1 online startup. Also authored around 11 research papers there from subjects including VPN, SOA, Cloud Computing, Ruby on Rails, Comparison between active directory and Fedora. Wrote book of knowledge on MySQL and IBM WebsphereMQ. The time spent at Infy was just….simply fantastic. Access to lots of resources was the main factor. We all have access to the internet, the thing is identifying your passion and going for it!

I remember I was not doing very well in Infy training, not even feelin that good. Toppers from all over the country competing against each other and surviving through that was certainly not a walk in the park.

One thing noteworthy and certainly by which every Infoscion can relate themselves is the awesome facilities they provide in campus. Having a 1040 seated multiplex screen which is circular from outside just gives you an idea of the magnanimity and  the standards which this company has set in India.

I have taken lots and lots of pictures of Infy campus and when I upload them on Fb, I get reactions that there are not such campuses even in the US. Hand cleaned roads, 5 star guest house accommodations, every sport facility you can ever think of, world class and huge gym, international standard cricket ground are just some of the factors which give you the jaw dropping feeling. And this is prevalent in all the campuses across India.

I indeed consider myself fortunate to have got a chance to have experience all that. I have done part with it to further gain expertise in my field of interest. From going to an internet café first time to going for graduate studies, 'vyaskartik2001' has come a long way indeed! 

Neeta Travels should be BANNED

 Just because you have a big fleet of buses and some kind of monopoly, does not mean you own the road. Meet Neeta travels, the biggest loafers, scoundrels and the worst private bus service I have ever experienced.

Having worked in Pune for the last 5 odd months and have made several trips to and fro from Pune to Mumbai, and having sat numerous times in this stupid bus service, I have gathered enough hatred for them that I feel like removing my chapals and throwing it on them whenever I see their buses. The reasons for the discontent follow.

Consider a trip from Pune to Mumbai. You go to Wakad flyover bus stop, where there is Neeta stop and from where majority IT crowd takes the bus back home on Fridays. People who have already experience their idiosyncrasy are aware that booking ticket in advance is of no use as the busses are always late by at least half an hour.

When a bus finally comes, it will wait at the bus stop for at least another half an hour and sometimes even 45mins till they find people to fill in. I can tell you having experienced all this; it really really causes a lot of frustration as it is just horrible waste of time.

When the bus finally starts, in half hour time, their stop comes at Lonavala, where again they take half an hour break. The bus stop is also good for nothing with highly priced bad food and again waste of time where people just wait for their bus to resume.

Somehow people bear all this as they look forward to go home and any complaints is dealt with a rude remark by them asking to take back our money and get down in the middle of the highway.

Mumbai to Pune is the same. All though they don’t wait for long times at the bus stop. A typical route form Borivali involves complete Mumbai Darshan. Not to mention their busses are all very old, uncomfortable and their management is clearly reflected from the above. They take atleast 3 and a half to 4 hours  on the Mumbai-Pune route compared to 2 and a half to 3 by others such as the MSRTC or the Purple/Prasanna.

Having tolerated their nonsense for initial month, I always opted to ignore Neeta for the to and from journey, once I even took the non AC red ST dabba and it took same time to reach home!

What is IPv6?

 Yesterday June 8th was celebrated as the World IPv6 Day. What is IPv6 and why is it so important? We all know what an IP address is and it is of the form 203.321.234.233 It is a set of four numbers which range from 1 to 255. Each unique number is used to identify every device connected to the internet.

 Now the limitation with this format is that the number of possible combinations is only 4 billion and that is less now as the number of devices online are increasing greatly. Apart from desktops and laptops, now there are millions of smart phones and thousands of tablets and gaming consoles which have online presence and thus an ip address is required for each. Not to forget that all the websites also have their own ip addresses. As of June 5th ,there are 232,000,000 websites in the world. That is huge! 

 What all this adds up to is that Internet is getting full. If nothing is done soon than there won't be many ip addresses left and you won't be able to access the internet. Here is where IPv6 comes in.

 The concept exists since long time, however the implementation has started now.IPv6 is “Internet Protocol Version 6″. The major difference between IPv6 and IPv4 is the difference of bits. IPv6 uses 128 bits while IPv4 uses only 32. A typical IPv6 address will look like:2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. That is the IPv6 system is capable of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (340 uni decillon or 3.4 x 10^38) addresses compared to the 4 billion of IPv4. 

 There will be lots of problem in this migration. The biggest problem is going to be the fact that IPv6 devices and IPv4 devices cannot interact with each other directly as there is a lot of difference between the two. The most visible difference comes in the fact that IPv4 addresses are seperated by dots and IPv6 are seperated by colons. The only solution seems to be that companies will have to offer their online services in both the versions till there is complete migration to IPv6 which may take a very long time.

On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks were amongst some of the major organizations that offered their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test drive". Also there is a detailed wiki page about this which you may check.