Swimming in Bangalore

Its such a pain to find out about swimming pools in Bangalore. Most of them are being maintained by Clubs who charge around 2-3 Lakhs for membership! WTH? For a one day/week swim, do I need to pay that much? Nope! Here I have 2 awesome swimming pools listed out! They charge minimum and you can have a very good time swimming. :-)

Bangalore BBMP Swimming Pool - PM Swimming Center
Location : Jayanagar
For 40 Mins : 16 INR.
The swimming pool looks clean. It has a good length and depth. For pro swimmers, this place would be an awesome practice ground.
But personally I didn't prefer this pool cause of the crowd that comes in here!

National Games Village Swimming Pool
Location : Koramangala
For 1 Hour : 100 INR.
Awesome Swimming Pool. Length : 25 Mts. Max Depth : 5 1/2 feet. Very decent crowd.
Open to all from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. I think they use Ozone. There's a separate pool for children. The pool is Unisex, so there's no specific timings for ladies and gents. Since, the crowd is decent, there shouldn't be any problem as such!!

Happy Swimming!!!

Trekking in Bangalore - Skandagiri

Thinking of Bangalore, the first thing that comes to one's mind is the shopping malls, pubs, etc. Its indeed a very painful process to search for weekend hangouts in Bangalore if you are obsessed with the malls and the same old restaurants. Also, when you have your friends coming to Bangalore for a weekend, you'll have to end up visiting the same coffee shops and hangout spots everytime. It gets very boring after quite a few months (Atleast for me it was!!)

Last week I was on a search for a completely new place to visit near Bangalore and spend my weekend there. I Bing-ed extensively and found this place, Skandagiri, a hill close to Nandi Hills. Skandagiri is famous for the view during sunrise and the clouds that surround the hill by that time. Besides that, its a good trekking spot. You've to be a real enthusiast to climb the rocky & damp terrain. And the whole trek is an amazing experience. Let me share on how to plan for a trek and reach this place.

What can you expect to see at Skandagiri?

The sunrise is awesome and the clouds that surround the hill during the morning. More than anything else, the trekking experience itself is far worth the bucks spent!

What's the minimum budget per person?

It generally depends on how you plan the trip. Exclusive of the conveyance charges, I'd say around 500 INR, should be quite good.

Right time to visit Skandagiri?

Weekends! If it rains, kindly avoid. Other than that it should be totally fine. Its generally preferred as a late night trekking spot. For the sunrise view, 6:00 a.m. is preferred. You need to be at the base at around 3:30 a.m. to make sure you are up the hill by 6:00 a.m. If trekking is what you are looking for, you can do it by late morning. It is generally not famous in here, but trust me, around 400 people visit early morning, and it might be a little cluttered there during sunrise.

Where is skandagiri? How to reach it?

This question is just a Bing Maps search away. Anyways, this place is around 70 Kms away from Bangalore. Its quite close to a place known as Chikballapur. There are many non stop buses that ply from Kempegowda Bus Station in Bangalore to this place through out the daytime. The rate is around ~40 INR per person. You can also get train to Chikballapur by around 8:40 a.m. from Majestic Railway station. The train has around 10 stops while the bus stops nowhere. The travel time from Bangalore to Chikballapur in both means is around 2 Hrs, sometimes the train is ~20 mins late. If you are travelling by own vehichle, its well and good. Just have a Map Service with you. From Chikballapur to Skandagiri base (distance of 4 Km), you can take an auto. The auto fare is 100 INR.

Reaching the top of the hill :

Its a mandatory rule that you need to take a guide to reach to the top. There are many guides who will be available near the start point of the Skandagiri trek. They charge around 100 INR for each person in your group. If you want to bargain, you can offer them for a day's pay which is around 500-700 INR. If you are planning not to take a guide, be sure to lose your way in the middle of your trek! Having said that, if you are visiting Skandagiri by morning, you can take a guide till half of the distance and do the rest of trekking by yourself. It's easy that way as you get more time to spend time with your group than listening to the guide's personal life tragedies and stories.

The trek is a little tiresome one and make sure you've enough water with you so that you don't run out of them at any point of time.

After Reaching the top?

You may be very hungry and tired. You can order for a noodles/bread omlette/simple bread with a guy there! You can even buy water bottles, but the cost is just 50 INR ;)

Top of the hill, you can also visit the temple, take a lot of pics and enjoy the beauty of nature. People who trek by night, take some bed spreads, etc to sleep there itself. In this case, you have to take some shawls, etc too. It might be a little cold out there. Night treks can be more fun cause of the campfires you can do. You can buy sticks for the campfire at a nominal rate from the villagers there. If you are trekking by late morning, you can stay at the top for around 2 hrs, take snaps, etc. You won't get much of things to do there. But, even then, its simply awesome as the view throughout is too good.

Make sure that you :

• carry three or more water bottles per person.
• have towel, bed spreads, shawls.
• take some snacks to munch after reaching the top.
• have good trekking shoes to get a good grip. As it may be slippery with normal ones!
• charge your mobile phones well before the journey.
• have around atleast 150 INR per person while trekking. Cause, if you run out of water, you may have to buy it at the top.
• carry torch lights to trek during night time. Its mandatory too.

Also, please don't throw away anything on the way or after reaching the top of Skandagiri. It feels really bad to see the plastic stuff in a very green environment.

If you have any comments/suggestions regarding this article or any information that I missed out, please write it as a comment or send a mail to sanjeevsince90@gmail.com

Compiling your first Linux Kernel

I'm going to explain you on how to compile the linux kernel and get it running on your system. First time experience of Kernel compilation is always an exciting one. Here, I'm sharing on how I compiled my first kernel (and this.. I did it long time ago. But to help you folks, I'm starting afresh so that you'll understand better from a beginners point of view) :-) Sometimes, beginners like you and me tend to get distracted, feel out of place when compiling the kernel. Many feel that we are just not so much of a geek to handle the Kernel level development stuff. Also, as there is simply many fundamental processes to learn before the actual compilation, it may even put you off. But, don't panic. Compilation of Linux Kernel can be done by beginners like you and me too. Please follow this instruction set carefully and if you have any doubts, do let me know!

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First things First - Checklist :

1. You should have a linux system. In my case I use, Ubuntu 10.10

2. Make sure you've free space well above 1.5 GB to make sure you don't end up with less hard disk space in the middle of the process

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1. Getting the linux Kernel Source

The first steps in compiling the source is obtaining the source. It's always a wise decision to opt for the latest stable kernel. Hence, go to www.kernel.org and download the latest stable kernel. It should be weighing around ~71 MB.

2. Extracting the Source

The source comes as a tar.bz2 file. Extract it to a proper location. I've extracted the linux kernel in the following path. /home/sanjeev/development/

3. Exploring the Kernel Source (Optional)

It's such a wonderful feel to check out the Kernel source. Being one of the most popular and powerful operating system, seeing its source code is such a bliss. If you are a beginner, it'll make you go ga-ga over it! Just check out the basic directory structure followed, open couple of files, try following the code.

4. Making the Kernel

This is one of the most important steps in the whole process, and this is what that makes compiling the Linux kernel such an easy process. Its whole a lot of complicated stuff, which is available for us in a very simplified manner. Being beginner, lets not get into the depth of which modules we need and which we don't. There is an easy way to just make the default modules only.

So, open terminal and use cd command to navigate to the directory where you extracted Linux source, in my case, it is cd /home/sanjeev/linux-2.6.38.4

now, type make defconfig in the terminal. This command is to create a configuration based on the defaults for your architecture. Configuring this way is the most easiest way and is recommended for beginners. During this configuration process, there are many modules in the kernel which are turned ON and OFF so that you compile just what is required for your machine. If you want to play some more, try make gconfig. But while writing this, I used make defconfig only!

Once the configuration is set in place, we need to Make the kernel. Make of Kernel is so powerful that we can even have multiple threads doing the job for us. This significantly reduces the time of build. You'll have your two cores in a dual core to run in 100% CPU utilization. So, you may want to give the command,

make -jN where N stands for the number of threads you want to spawn. In a dual core case, just type make -j4

This is a time consuming process. Go grab some nap.

After few hours, you'll get the message, Build Successful and a path information about where you can find the Kernel Image.

5. Installing the Kernel

We are almost done with 80% of our job, this step will be the last mile. The general path, where you can find the Kernel image is, /arch/i386/boot/bzImage, in my case, I found it in, /arch/x86/boot/bzImage.

Copy this Image file into your /boot directory. You can achieve this by using 

cp /arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot

You may want to rename the Kernel image to a different name. So, try mv /boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-

Now, we need to get our Grub find our latest Kernel. So, type in the Terminal the following command, update-grub and then type grub-mkconfig.

The first command, helps you find your kernel and add it to the template files that generate the grub.cfg file. The next command helps you generate the new grub.cfg file with your Kernel updated in it.

Now, restart the system and let me know your experience! :-)

Hope you found it a real pleasant way to build your first Kernel!