Hiking Big Sur, CA in one day for the first time

Big Sur, in CA is one of the hike I most enjoyed the best in the Bay area! Nevertheless, one of the best highways to drive as well. Therefore, I decided I shall document this hike and share some photos we took as well. Two friends and me went of this hike and the photos of the scenic views were taken by all of us in turns, so credit to all of us :)

Big Sur in one day for the first time means you need to atleast make it to these two hikes:
1. McWay WaterFall Trail and
2. Ewoldsen Trail

We followed these options from the Big Sur Hiking Website. And were not disappointed. These two hikes are of the scale between Moderate and High level of difficulty. But the hike is completely worth it!

Going forward, Ill keep my post less verbal and more enduring to the eyes :)

The Highway CA 1 as is described in so many websites is extremely scenic and the identity to entering Big Sur is the bridge that can be seen in the picture.



Another image from this scenic point
:

The most I love about this scene is amazing blue Ocean! Pacific, became my Love!

We reached the Big Sur National Park and headed towards the McWay WaterFall Trail and were amazed by the view of this WaterFall. This trail is only less than a mile and is very Easy. Best place to bring people to get a scenic view without much strain.









And then you would reach the end of the trail within less a mile.  And some of the pics from the end of the trail spot.





The above picture is that of the place of an old building and the history of the founders of the place, which I do not recollect at the top of my head :D.  This is again at the end of the trail

We came back to the start of the trail to head towards Ewoldsen Trail. This trail gave me so many mixed feelings starting from "phew! This is a tough hike" to "woaaah! amazing view!" to "where is the end point of this????"

This trail starts off with the introduction of Redwood trees and creeks.




There is a really short Canyon trail, where you can get some clips. I didn't take scenic picture of it, so please excuse :)

Finally we start the Ewoldsen trail and climb the strenuous hike upwards and finally we reached a point that looks like this:






We initially thought this is was the ending point, but apparently not, we got to know from fellow hikers. Then we continued our way. The hike from here was not that bad but we were so drained off energy from the hike so far, that the next few miles were slow. But the view from this point was simply brilliant, we were above the entire Redwood forest and could see the tip of all trees.










The beauty cannot be explained, has to be felt.

Then we continued but couldn't get to final point,



So when we reached a point like this and saw the sun set, and we decided to head back as the forest gets much more darker under the trees than above it. So finally, we reached back when it was almost completely dark! We made it back on time :)

Overall, Amazing hike ! Everyone visiting Bay area must make a visit here if possible.

Thank you for taking time to read the post.

Course & Side effect of Antibiotics

Use: As the title says it is for people who need to know how antibiotics affect your body and possible side-effects.

PS: This post is not written by a doctor but information I gathered and I am writing this post for the reason that I could not find a direct answer to what I searching for.

People take antibiotics for various infections, mostly strep throats, acne and bacterial infections. Antibiotics help kill bacteria. While there are amazing reads for how antibiotics works such as here and here. The side effects that are caused because of the antibiotics was not found easily online. And from discussion with people, I observe that each person responds differently to antibiotics. Although this post might not give you complete information, you will get some insight and reading links from here.

The Course:
The important thing to know about taking antibiotics is to complete the course. The simplest reasoning is this, bacteria's are of different levels, the high level ones which are causing the painful symptoms such as throat irritation, high temperature etc and the low level ones which may be dormant (not causing the visible irritation) but are supporting the reproduction of bacteria. When one starts to take antibiotics, within a day or two, the symptoms are reduced, and the person starts to feel better. The reason is the high level bacteria are killed from the two-day antibiotic intake. But the low-level bacteria which are slightly more resistant to a small dose of antibiotic are not killed yet. At this point, if one stops to take antibiotics, the low-level bacteria, would reproduce new bacteria with resistance to the antibiotic sample it obtains from the two-day intake. Now the DNA for the new bacteria is antibiotic resistant and when these bacteria become active and cause infection, they would not respond to the antibiotics, one takes the next time.

For more details, you can check out information from Mayo and UK Guardian.

The Side-effects:
When antibiotics are taken over a period of time, there are some painful/not-so-painful side-effects. Some of the side-effects, I am aware of, are acne, mouth-ulcers, troubled-stomach etc. This is the reason some doctors suggest one to take antibiotics with B-Complex tablets and include lots of pasteurized yogurt/curd and reduce foods that detoxify the body (such as caffeine, oils, alcohol etc) in their diet. The reason for this is the antibiotics taken to kill the infection-causing bacteria, kills some necessary bacteria that are required for the body as well. One such reasoning (that I obtained from a post) is the good bacteria called gut microflora, which is present in the stomach is responsible for breaking-down the food consumed and detoxifying the body. The antibiotics kills this bacteria, and as a result of which the body loses its capability to detoxify the body and results in the side-effects.

Overall, it is important to know the working of a medicine before one takes it so that one regulates their diet to avoid the side-effects.

Thank you for taking time to read the post. 

Installing CCNx on Ubuntu OS

Here I would like to share how to install CCNx step-by-step. I am referring this site, but the java implementation gave me some issues that I have added the steps here, in case you run into those issues.

1. Ubuntu 12.10/higher/lower
2. Download version ccnx-0.8.0/or higher
3. Install the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install ant autoconf libssl-dev libexpat1-dev libpcap-dev libecryptfs0 libxml2-utils 
automake gawk gcc g++ git-core pkg-config libpcre3-dev

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk (for Ubuntu 12.04)

               (OR)      openjdk-7-jdk (for Ubuntu 12/10)

4. (optional) Create a software link for ccnx folder and put the original file inside "src" folder

$ mkdir src
$ mv ccnx-0.8.x src/
$ ln -s src/ccnx-0.8.x ccnx

5. Go inside ccnx folder

$ cd ccnx

$ ./configure
$ make 
$ make install


This concludes the installation steps of CCNx. You can use the CCNx webpage for different experimentation. 

Thank you for taking time to read the post.

Installing OpenVSwitch in Ubuntu 12.10

USE: People who are planning to using OpenVswitch, these steps works for the latest version of OVS as of 12/16/2013

With my latest experience with OpenVSwitch, I wanted to write this blog to post all the information I was able to find and all the problems I came across while working with OVS.

The concepts I have covered here are only working with OpenVswitch. There are tons of study materials and tutorials to understand concepts of Openflow and Software Defined Networking out there.

Firstly, I would like to start off with some basic steps to install OpenVswitch and basic facts that you should be aware of:
1. There are many sources out there to help you install openvswitch, try to stick to the main openvswitch man page, they give you the most latest, the rest of the materials might not be updated to the latest one.
2. Openvswitch is Linux version sensitive. Not knowing this fact landed me with many kernel-based issues. Since OVS install some kernel modules, the compatibility of OVS with the OS version and kernel version is important to know.
3. Some of the very useful websites for OpenVSwitch are of Brent Salisbury and Scott Lowe and many others you could find by just googling OVS :)

Installation steps:
1. For latest OVS 2.0, Ubuntu 12.10 is the best performing OS. For earlier versions of OVS, earlier Ubuntu versions would work fine.
2. Following some of the directions from here. Install the following:
     

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install dkms

sudo apt-get install openvswitch-datapath-source bridge-utils

sudo module-assistant auto-install openvswitch-datapath

sudo apt-get install openvswitch-brcompat openvswitch-common openvswitch-controller

apt-get install -y git python-simplejson python-qt4 python-twisted-conch automake autoconf gcc

uml-utilities libtool build-essential git pkg-config linux-headers-uname -r

git clone git://openvswitch.org/openvswitch

cd openvswitch

./boot.sh

./configure --with-linux=/lib/modules/uname -r/build

make && make install

./boot.sh

./configure --with-linux=/lib/modules/uname -r/build

make && make install
make modules_install

/sbin/modprobe openvswitch 

touch /usr/local/etc/ovs-vswitchd.conf

mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/openvswitch

ovsdb-tool create /usr/local/etc/openvswitch/conf.db vswitchd/vswitch.ovsschema
ovsdb-server --remote=punix:/usr/local/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock \

                     --remote=db:Open_vSwitch,Open_vSwitch,manager_options \
                     --private-key=db:Open_vSwitch,SSL,private_key \
                     --certificate=db:Open_vSwitch,SSL,certificate \
                     --bootstrap-ca-cert=db:Open_vSwitch,SSL,ca_cert \
                     --pidfile --detach

ovs-vsctl --no-wait init

ovs-vswitchd --pidfile --detach

3. then bring_up_br0 using the following steps:
     - write a script file (*.sh) with the following lines and run it in command-line as root

        ovs-vsctl add-br br0

        ovs-vsctl add-port br0 eth0

        ifconfig eth0 0 && br0 192.168.1.x netmask 255.255.255.0

        route del default gw 192.168.1.1 eth0

        route add degfault gw 192.168.1.1 br0

4. Next add the controller IP Address to the switch. 

   ovs-vsctl set-controller br-int tcp:192.168.1.x:6633

5. Next you can start using OVS and Controller for any of your experimentations

Thank you for taking time to read. 

Power of Writing on your Palm

I write this post to make a very simple point. Have you ever been offended when a person writes something you told them on their palm? Well, from personal experience, I think you should not.

When someone makes a note in their phones, notebooks etc, the number of times they are going to see it is determined by when their brain tells them to do so. But on the other hand, without any conscious effort, one sees their palm many times especially when they wash their hand. Now when there is nothing written on the palm, one doesn't make an effort to recollect as "having seen" their palm, but if something is written on the palm, one makes an effort to read it and recollect the moment they wrote it. This may happen a few times, and each time they read it, they review the note and thus memorizing it eventually and effortlessly. Considering that are brain has a huge storing capacity, it is possible that even if they forget it in the short term, the memory will pop up at some point.

Next time, make sure you make someone write that important point on their palm ;-)

Thank you for taking time to read the post!

Happy New Year 2014

To this new year, to more posts and to simplicity and more originality.

To Family and Friends, near and dear ones. 

To Love, Peace and all amazing things.

To Hopes and Promises.

To Humanity.

Happy New Year 2014

Greenhouse Gas Emission in Highly Populated Countries

USE: Every human being

I write this post when I was triggered some thoughts after reading this post from SiliconIndia. I got to see the numbers from this post, but this problem is very REAL.

As a born-Indian, I visit my country ever-so-often and each time I go to India, the initial few days are a struggle between my respiratory system and the environment. The pollution in every major city is so much higher than a city in moderately populated country and now from this post, I get the number that CO2 emission has increased by 7.7 percent from the past year. Those days are the times I wonder, how are people even living here. But then the lung just gets used to the available environment and life moves on. From my perspective, this shouldn't be the case, something has to be done.

Comparing some stats from the post and other details:

Country	CO2 Emission	Area Sq miles (Sq Km)	CO2 Emission percent/sq mile	Population density/sq mile
China	27 percent	3.748 million sq miles (9.707 million km²)	7.2 x 10^-6	365
United States	14 percent	3.794 million sq miles (9.827 million km²)	3.69 x 10^-6	84
India	6 percent	1.269 million sq miles (3.288 million km²)	4.72 x 10^-6	954

The population density per sq mile was obtained from here.

I would agree that similar stats have been discussed in other posts, but my main purpose of this post was to discuss about these stats. I am considering only three countries as they are among the highest emitters of CO2.

Discussion on the above data:
China seems to be at a high threat, but as per latest news, "Consumption from renewable sources and hydropower in China grew by a quarter in 2012." This shows some good progress, although I do not have personal experience of the atmosphere in China.

From the statistics of US, it seems that the CO2 is so much more from other sources than just human beings, as on an average 84 people emit a relatively high amount of CO2.

And India, a lot of people, a lot of vehicles, a lot of CO2.

What can be done:
 Considering the huge amount of population and the need for more, what can be possibly done to solve this ever-rising problem. I believe awareness, above and more, a peer-pressure. For example, a while back, smoking had been one of the cool-factors, people were peer-pressured into smoking. And from the increasing number of lung cancer deaths led to awareness spreading of smoking as a bane and soon enough number of smokers started to reduce. Similarly, being green, should be a trend, people, kids, everybody could be peer-pressured to be green. In a way Tesla Motors is making this happen, the trend for owning a Tesla car has become a trend. (I hope they come up with their economy model soon!!)

Similarly, different ways to reduce CO2 emission, such as for example:
Each person: reduce the need for possessing machine-made goods. More machine-made goods, more factories manufacture, more CO2 emissions.
Each house: reduction in the number of vehicles per house, resorting to electric vehicles; more vehicles, more CO2 emissions. From personal experience, I am aware that most families own more than 1 vehicle, it would be a great step to make one of the vehicles electric for a start.
Each state/country: make ways to resort to renewable sources of energy (I am aware that a lot of people are already working towards this and I am making only a suggestion here :))

Finally, I conclude by saying, if all were to take this problem personal, we would start to adopt the various green ways of living.

Thank you for taking time to read the post!