Extreme Entertainment

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. ~Hilaire Belloc

We started on friday at 1 in the night. Off to Shivpuri in Rishikesh. We were late by an hour and half but me and Ankur made the better out of it y eating some Egg Burji and plain Parathas. 17 in total we got into the bus and started our onward journey. The bus was great and the group was awesome. Pure entertainment from Don, Pappi and all the others. Puke fest was on from me and an 'unknown' personality. Then a grand sleep only to be hindered by the steer of the bus when it went through those hair pin turns uphill.

The place was serene and the camp side was breath taking. Tents were setup by our co-coordinator Vinod and 2 other helpers. They were adjacent to a narrow stream which lead to the main Ganges flow. They advised us not to go to the main stream but goto the adjacent one. The water was cold and the first thing we did was to go in an refresh ourselves. Breakfast followed and then started the volley ball matches. The sun was intense but we still managed to hang on. After the matches I was dragged by Abhilash and Ankur to have a quick bath which I thought I would have after the sweat had dried. Lunch followed and then we were told that we would be starting the rafting at 3.

All the guys were worn out. Rohan's eyes were bright red and some of them even had a quick nap. But all were ready at 3 to set off for the extreme rafting. We put our life jackets, wore our helmets and took a paddle each and went onwards towards the raft. The raft weighed 80 kgs approx. It was specially built so that water never stayed inside the boat for long. The 'rapids' were for amateurs and we were given strict instructions what to do. Vinod and his team excelled in training us for the rapids. There were 6 rapids and the 3rd one was the most fierce. I managed to secure a position on the 3rd row and sat on the right. Water flushed in but we did not budge. We stood strong and fended the fierce waters until reached our destination. We were allowed to jump into the water after a certain point as the water was harmless and we had our life protectors. The water was pretty cold and Aditya and Srinath who were in the water for a long time shivered all the way after they got of the river.

There was also a place were people were allowed to jump off a high cliff. It must have been about 50 meters high. I did not take the jump and Shveta kept on teasing me after she had made hers. I give no reasons for not doing the jump. I felt it better to stand and watch rather that do it myself. People may call me a scary cat but I never felt the need to jump. Dont know why. But it was awesome seeing all those splashes going wrong. Ankur displacing atleast 10 buckets of water after his jump, Shveta doing a titanic and getting a rescuer to jump into the water, Surbhi falling chest first which definitely must have hurt her, Saumitri being pushed off guard by the instructor, Aditya taking a running plunge into the water.

By the time we reached the camp we were all tired. I was finding it tough to keep my eyes open. After having a tea we are all up again. The camp fire was lit and we started having drinks and food. Many of them retreated into their tents and by 12 all were dead asleep.

The next day Abhilash and Amit woke me up by carrying me and dropping me on the sand. After that episode we started playing Volley Ball. Puneet wished to go for trekking but had only very little supporters. I tried to convince everyone but failed miserably. I now understand that I am just a follower and not a leader. I have always felt that a trip is always as good as the company you are in. Having to go trekking with just 5-6 people did not excite me.

After a dip in the water and beer we started off to Rishikesh. We saw Laxman Jhula and ate from Choti Walah. Then Surbhi left with her cousin and we onward home. Don entertained us with his wits and stories and many of us laughed our brains out. We reached Noida by 12 in the night and after taking the remains of the colas, namkeens, pulpy oranges Srinath and I went to the flat.

All time LOW

I am no expert in finance. But the condition as I understand is threatening. People are being laid off and companies are not ready to invest or acquire. My sister also says that she had also seen people getting laid off in here firm. The rupee is at an all time low. Jet yesterday announced that it would sack 1100 of its employees including pilots. The only thing that is being printed in the papers is how bad the financial situation is and how Mr Chitambaram is trying to cope up with the pressure. The US market is affected and therefore our market. The dependency is what concerns common man.

Its like if they are down, we are dead.

Post Production Stress

Two weeks before we went live with one of our products. A product where I worked personally for 4 months. I still do not feel I did justice to the product as the actual problems still glare at me when I see the application. It was a whole lot of work within 4 months and a more work when it went live. As the product was the first one to go live from us, we where a little tense. Some glitches here and there and I was all stressed out.

Its a whole big deal making an application live or into production. Especially if the application is not owned completely by you. The task of closely monitoring it, making sure that nothing breaks, maintaining the backups, ensuring that binding is done quickly and effectively if something breaks is completely done by the team. This is very tense. And I deeply appreciate all those managers who sympathize and stay beside their team during those stressful times. If you are answerable then you better have pretty good answers.

The build technique that was made is my main area of concentration this time around. Indraneel was the person in charge and I sat with him one time to deploy the code live. The scripts written via capistrano were excellent. The deployment can be to the test server or the live server. This requires issuing of different commands and writing separate tasks. The commands issued are remote commands and they usually are stop and start commands for mongrel. This application had also ap4r in it for asynchronous processing and therefore required a restart for that as well.

Monit has also been installed in this server and ap4r and mongrel has been configured to restart once stopped. The mod proxy balancer has been put along with apache so that mongrel clustering can be implemented. The balancer member written inside the proxy tags has an ip associated to it. This is where the actual transition in case of updates for the live application comes into picture. Using apache we could have something called a graceful restart using the 'apachectl graceful' command. Normally when a new code is deployed with all those changes and upgrades the server (mongrel in this case) must be restarted. But with graceful restart Indraneel just has to do minimal stuff. He first deploys the new code onto a server started with a different port, say mirror. Now what he does is change the balancer member port number to the mirror port and does a graceful restart. And wallah .. a work well done. This could also be automated if there were 2 virtual host files and according to the live/mirror deployment, the file is overwritten by the specific files.

Great work !!