rxanand@gmail.com
Contents
- Bio: About myself
- Photo albums
- India
- IT and startups
- Hobbies
Photo albums
| Three albums of photos from the streets of Hyderabad in India. |  |
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India
- An "Appeal to our patrons" New
- The cult of the topper. Some interesting newspaper clippings about high school toppers - the students who store the highest marks in public examinations.
- How "cable" Internet access really works in Hyderabad.
- A fruity word.
- From the police blotter: A weird little story about a kidnapping attempt gone bad.
- School examinations and high society.
- Pentium, Itanium,...Learnium?. No, this is definitely not a new processor from Intel! Click on the link to find out what it is.
- Lets bifurcate!: A news article that illustrates common usage of one of my favorite Indian English words.
- A "demoralizing" letter to the editor.
- Entrance examinations: Exams to take exams to take exams ....
- What do I call you?: South Indian names explained.
IT and startups
Some thoughts on the IT industry based on my experiences at IBM and Reefedge.- This is the second article in my series "Lessons learned". This one is about my encounters with the well-known list of fallacies about distributed programming described by L. Peter Deutsch.
- The first article in my "Lessons learned" series is about how we managed software development at Reefedge.
- Software as an appliance: Although Reefedge was purely a software company, our product was strutured as a network appliance. In this article I explain why we took this approach.
- DIY networking: Some thoughts about the concept of DIY (Do It Yourself) IT as applied to networking components.
Hobbies
I have been facinated by model trains since I was a toddler and have had many train sets over the years. As a child, I played endlessly with a Triang-Hornby trainset that my parents bought for me in 1970. Due to a lack of time, space and money, I drifted away from the hobby in high school and college. I rejoined the hobby in a major way about fifteen years ago when my wife presented me with a Märklin starter set for my birthday. As a child, I had always coveted the Märklin set that my friend Jayashankar Srinivasan had so it was great to finally be able to have my own trains. I have been building a layout very slowly in my basement shown in the photos linked below- Photos of my model train layout. I have actually rebuilt layout several times. some details of the constructions process are also shown.
- Image processing based approach to train presence detection. A brief article about my experiments in using image processing to detect train occupancyon my train layout. My ultimate goal is to control my trains entirely by computer.
- Model train control with Python. A preliminary report about my efforts towards fullt computerizing my train layout using more conventional train position feedback.
- After being a Marklin modeller for over fifteen years, I have started exploring two rail systems. This is a journal describing my project in this field.