This is the MG Road, this one goes to Indian Express Bus stop .. bla bla etc. At one junction, the auto stopped under semi-constructed namma metro flyover.  He started enriching my knowlege with some stats. Construction of these metro tracks started way back in Dec. 2006 and its 2009, they have not achieved anything concrete yet. They are spoiling the garden city by erasing all the gardens. What’s the point, 2012 is near, nothing is gonna survive.

Gosh !! I was amazed. The movie 2012, seems to have made a real impact even on the autowalas.

Case 2: Weekly shopping at Reliance Fresh for the vegetables. At the vegetable counter, the reliance guy, Bhaiyya 2012 dekhi kya? Ekdum mast movie hai .. jarur dekhiye … kya mast effects hai …

Looks like the movie has made an impact in different segments and sectors of the Indian Population. What’s your take on this ? Bunch of my friends liked it and appreciated. I am yet to watch it

How did we achieve it ?

- Login to a remote machine using ssh

- play a video using cvlc ( command line vlc )

- record the video using istanbul session recorder ( if u are in linux )

- convert it to mp4 format using ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i file.ogg -sameq  file.mp4

- Overlay the sound using ffmpeg and .mp3 of the same video. As in the sound would have played on remote machine and hence istanbul session recorder would not capture it.

ffmpeg -i file.mp4 -map 0.0 -i file.mp3 -map 1.0 -acodec copy -vcodec copy -ab 128k -ar 44100 file.mp4

- Crop the video, if you want to remove stuffs of your desktop before upload

ffmpeg -i output.mp4 -croptop 50 -cropbottom 50 output1.mp4

=> Get a large packet of Haldiram Bhujia Sev

From Food

=> Get two tomatoes, two onion, 4 lemons, 1-2 green chillies, black pepper powder etc

From Food

=> Cut the tomatoes and onion in small pieces and lemon into 2 halves as shown below

From Food

=> Mix onion and tomatoes in a large bowl

From Food

=> Add black pepper ( don’t add too much of it, as it may upset the stomach)

From Food

=> Squeeze all the lemon in a different bowl and remove the seeds

From Food

=> Empty the haldiram bhujia sev pack in the bowl containing onion and tomatoes

From Food

=> Add the lemon juice in the mixture and mix well.

From Food

=> Add topping of coriander leaves and nicely cut green chillies, mix well and it is ready to serve

From Food

The chef can be reached here

9:45PM – 12 K.Ms - Old Madras Road signal. Lights, red.  Gigantic water drops started falling. Being on a two wheeler, had no option but to stop. Parked in Indira Nagar on the juice shop. Had an awesome mango shake. Rain pouring in at gushing speed. Roads started submerging , water everywhere. All traffic rules violated, everyone rushing here and there. No option , but to wait, cosy and dry under the shop.

10:15PM – 12K.Ms – Making calls to friends to kill boredom

10:20PM – 12K.Ms – More calls !!! geez, I am bored.

10:30PM – 12K.Ms – More calls !!! geez, I am bored.

10:40PM – 12K.Ms – Rain seemed to reduce in intensity. Made an attempt to proceed further, drenched slighlty. But bearable. Heading south.

10:50PM – 10K.Ms – Whoa, what’s that? Never seen so many vehicles and jam on a flyover (Domlur flyover). Cars coming in from all the directions. What’s happening. Rainfall intensified.

11:00PM – 10K.Ms – Managed to get down from the flyover, swerving in between car spaces. Drenched badly. Roads submerged in water till knee length. Parked the vehicle and hid under the big stationary shop.

11:00PM – 10K.Ms - Waiting for rain to reduce. Cars, trucks , buses all stuck up on the road. Honking honking ! Jam packed. No one goes anywhere. No movement on other side of the road. Looks like the other end is witnessing a phoenix, ganges in south !!! World came to standstill.  People trying to manoeuvre their bikes across the water logged gaps, pavements. People falling in water logged ditches, heading in some direction. Total chaos. Power went off. Street lights off. Can see big shiny blue DELL on the far end.

11:30PM – 10K.Ms No traffic movement ahead. Looks like the inner ring roads are submerged totally under water for a stretch of 4KMs. No one goes ahead. The mob broke the divider to let the water flow out.

12:00 AM – 10K.Ms Still waiting under the shop. A noble voice shouted: The inner ring road is totally submerged and vehicle movement is impossible. Cars take a reverse and follow Old Airport Road, Old Madras Road, MG Road etc. Slight movement in vehicle began.

12:15 AM – 10K.Ms The traffic reduced. All vehicles headed in reverse direction. Drizzling. I too took the reverse route .

12:30AM – 8K.Ms. Brigade Road . Roads damp, but not flooded.

12:30AM – 6K.Ms. Bannerghatta Road.  I am an idiot that i did not take this route. May be I would have escaped that Domlur inner ring road crisis.

12:45AM – 2K.Ms Outer Ring Road. Whoa, I am reaching home finally . Hurray.

12:50 AM – 0K.Ms Alas ! Reached home. Drenched. Took a shower to freshen. Had dinner. Did some tweeting and finally slept at 2:00AM . It was a tiring day .

Epilogue

Wallet got drenched badly. It took two full days to dry. Luckily, the two 500 notes managed to stay off from getting biologically recycled owing to excessive hydration.

Catastrophes bring people closer. They seamlessly start helping each other without thinking as otherwise they would.

Voila, it was an amazing experience

A brief intro on how it happened

It all started with my adamant attitude to have a dual partition on my Dell Vostro 1510. Fedora, my obvious choice led to multiple crash of the lappy’s motherboard. The reason sounds strange, but is the concrete reason, as it happened not once but rather twice. Burnt the ISO image of Fedora Core 10 on a DVD and began to boot the lappy. It started normal, but before the UI asking for Fedora installation could load, the laptop hung with nothing shown on the LCD. Forceful shutdown and subsequent reboot led to weird behavior, caps lock, num lock and scroll LEDs glowing indefinitely, without anything up on the LCD. The usual methods of removing the RAM, resetting the static electricity failed to work and it turned out that it was a motherboard failure. Hence a replace for the same was done by the manufacturer.

Video

The video below is shootout of the replacement of the motherboard. ( Done by manufacturer’s engineer). But you may give a try on your old laptop or if your eagerness could not be held anymore.
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part5

Part 6

Part 7

How did we capture and process the video

The video capture was done using a Sony Ericsson phone and which resulted in multiple 3gp files. It was essential to merger these multiple files and convert them into flv format for upload using some tool. ffmpeg was the ideal option and worked like a wonder. Key steps were …

-> Converting indiviual 3GP files to flv with all the parameters viz. bitrate, frame etc

ffmpeg -i file.3gp -s 320×240 -vcodec h263 -r 25000 -b 200 -ab 64 -acodec amr -ac 1 -ar 8000 file.flv

-> Merge all files into single. This method somehow did not work with flv files, hence they were converted to mpg format and back to flv for upload to youtube.

converting to mpg with same parameters

ffmpeg -i file.flv -sameq -y file.mpg

Merging into single file

cat 76.mpg 77.mpg 78.mpg 79.mpg 80.mpg >final_mpg.mpg(This method somehow did not work with flv files)

And finally, back to flv file

ffmpeg -i final_mpg.mpg -sameq final.flv

File fetchrequest.sh

#!/bin/bash
while [ 10 -eq 10 ]

#Runs in a infinite loop checking request file at server B every second
do
if [ `env | grep -c lastCounter` = 1 ];then
newCounter=`curl -s http://serverB/requestFile.txt | tail -1 | cut -d: -f1`

#Reading request file at server B
param=`curl -s serverB/requestFile.txt | tail -1 | cut -d: -f2` #Extracting the request parameters
echo newCounter : $newCounter lastCounter : $lastCounter

#If there is a new request, sending a response back to the server B
if [ "$newCounter" != "$lastCounter" ]; then
echo "Need to send a response"
echo "Response URL : http://serverA/something.pl?action=something&param1&param2"

#Trimming of the response that needs to be send to serverB and storing it in a variable
output=`curl -s "http://serverA/something.pl?action=something&param1&param2" | grep 'cap\\|img' |
sed \ 's/<src>.*<\/src>//g;s/<cap>/\:/g;s/<\/cap>//g;s/<img>/\:/g;s/<\/img>//g'`
echo "Response received : $output"

#writing the response to a flat file to be FTPed to server B
`echo $output>"rp_$newCounter.txt"`
`export filename==rp_$newCounter.txt`
`echo ls -l "rp_$newCounter.txt"`
typeset -i responseSize=`wc -c rp_$newCounter.txt | cut -d" " -f1`
echo "Response size $responseSize"

#If the process response is garbled, small or null, sending a dummy error in FTP file
if [ $responseSize = 1 ];then
`echo "We are working , try later" > "rp_$newCounter.txt"`
fi

#making an FTP connection to serverB and launching the response file
`curl -s -T "rp_$newCounter.txt" -u username:password"ftp://serverB/rp_$newCounter.txt"`
echo "Uploaded the FTP file for $newCounter request"
`rm -f rp_$newCounter.txt`
echo "Deleting rp_$newCounter.txt after upload"

#Updating the request environment variable
lastCounter=$newCounter
export lastCounter
fi
else
lastCounter=`curl -s http://serverB/mobRequests.txt | tail -1 | cut -d: -f1`
export lastCounter
fi
done

The whole system works very well, and the requests are processed and response send to user. There are however limitations to this model.

Officer : You have over-speeded

Motorist : Hmm… I was just 70 Km/hr

Officer [Hands him a printout]:  See this. You were at 76 Km/hr. The statistics have been captured by the #@&^*#5 camera with %#6*#*9 technology. Its all given below. I will have to fine you . 300 bucks.

Poor motorist had no other option.

P.S – Identity of motorist is concealed and is of no concern with respect to the blog.