Misc

This post covers idea of NCMC design and it’s limitations

More and more EVs (Electric Vehicles) are visible on the road as time is passing. On two-wheelers, it’s getting quite common. I don’t have sales stats but I can see as many as 1-2 scooters are electric out of 10 in the area. In cars, it’s still uncommon but one can see a few Tata Nexon EV and Toyota with green number plates when driving around in Delhi, besides many parked electric cars at terminal 3 in Delhi airport parking.

In Aug of this year, I posted about three-phase power. Subsequently, I had a discussion with a friend from Delhi about bonding neutral with earth/ground at the distribution panel. He has a commercial load of 20KW delivered via three phases and his electrician advised him to bond neutral with the ground. We both were curious whether it was technically correct or not. Taking a break from network engineering, here goes a post about it.

Migration to Hugo

I have migrated this 14-year-old blog from a dynamic WordPress (based on WordPress) to a static website (based on Hugo). It was a pretty lengthy process even when I had scripts converting the WordPress XML export into markdown files.

Why a static site?

This gives a few advantages like:

• Must faster rendering as all the pages are generated well in advance & pushed to the server
• Better security (as the backend is not at all exposed unlike WordPress where backend admin portal was visible & behind an authenticated URL)
• Easy to distribute and put behind CDN
• Easy to type posts as now it’s just markdown

I haven’t finalised the hosting location for this newer site. For now, it’s on Google Cloud firebase but I am still just playing with the options. If I get some free time, I might just tweak my PowerDNS setup to start using GeoIP data for the request and serve the local server in a given country. That way I can host the website in India, Europe and US and let authoritative DNS steer the traffic. More on this later!

Just came across this brilliant talk by my friend Bert Hubert. It covers so nicely about the mad rush to just outsource everything and how innovation is lost. While he mentioned names of EU telcos in examples, unfortunately situation isn’t that different in this side of world either. Operator in South Asia also very much suffer with this problem.

Slides of this presentation are here.

Lately, I have been playing with many tools and as one gets into deploying those tools, SSL comes as a pain point. A large number of web-based tools I use are internal and on a private network. VPN (with OSPF running over FRR) takes care of connectivity but still, it’s good to have SSL on these machines. Non-HTTPs websites are getting more & more ugly with browsers and even things like password managers do not fill the passwords anymore on their own for non-HTTPS websites.

A fascinating lecture by Mr Anil Swarup (retired IAS, ex-Secretary to Govt. of India & State Govt of UP) at Lt Governer, Puducherry Raj Niwas. His Wikipedia page here and Twitter account here.

The first half is the talk itself, followed by some time of Q&A, followed by a short talk by Mr Ashwani Kumar (Chief Secretary to Government of Pondicherry) and in the end is Lt Governor Kiran Bedi.

 

And it’s less than a week before the INNOG 2 i.e Indian Network Operators Group Conference 2. We (Indians) are little late to start a NOG but it’s finally working out and this is the 2nd event. First one happened last year.

Event website: www.innog.net

 

Why INNOG is important and why we should care?

Well, having a functional NOG is as important for local community as a working Internet Exchange Point. In absence of either people just start peering outside for an expensive price. There a lot of things which Indian Network Operators need to work on and without knowledge sharing that’s just not going to happen.

Background

I got married a while back. My wife and I had a discussion and both were in favour that she changes her surname. This was also based on our discussion with my sister who suggested getting it done instead of keeping different surnames for us. As we were getting married certificate, we both were surprised to find that my wife’s surname cannot be simply updated on various IDs using just the marriage certificate. Instead one has to go through a process. Since I spent a bit of time on this before, here’s a quick blog post about how exactly it’s done in India. Warning: India specific post. Any International reader can just hang up right away! Plus if you are not in the process of name/surname change, this post would be useless for you anyways! :)   First and foremost, name update can happen only in IDs and not on any certificate document. Certificate work with old name + a notice published in The Gazette of India.  In terms of IDs, we had the following to update: author: “Anurag Bhatia” url: “/2018/05/misc/legally-changing-name-in-india/”

Just saw this excellent TEDx talk by Ritu Karidha (ISRO Scientist & Dept. Operations director, ISRO Mars Mission). It tells about some really hard challenges of the mission and the fact that still ISRO succeeded. :)