Jmit

It has been few days since I am out of college. Was trying to put this blog post but wasn’t getting time for that. Earlier this month I visited Radaur with my father and vacated my room. It was an interesting experience of staying in that room for a while and working on so many things from there. This is how my room used to look like: Overall time was a long time and an experience full of surprises, fun times, bad times, very bad times and more importantly learning about life. In terms of learning - I learned bit of technical stuff related to networking, along with non-technical learning like understanding how world works, what makes people work, what makes people not to work etc. :)

Exam days still going and a few more to go. Before I go further on actual blog topic, a small story to share.  

“Being a Superman” story ;)

Recently it rained quite heavily in Radaur and I was trapped in a situation where stairs to my room got in touch with live grid electricity due to a badly insulated wire joint.  Stairs are made of metal and that brought this dangerous situation. I was informed about “current in stairs” from someone living in neighbourhood who accidentally touched stairs while it was raining. Next, I had to get down from there to go to my home. There was just no other option, and waiting for an electrician to figure it out was impractical idea. There was no option of turning down main power switch since leak was before switch in main line. At this point I gave some engineering thoughts.

And finally academic session over. Done with all vivas and related stuff. Next will be exams likely in June. Time for me to get ready for travel. :)   Anyways an interesting topic for today’s post - Google Public DNS. Lot of us are familier with popular (and free) DNS resolvers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I have covered reason in previous posts on why it tends to fail with Content Delivery networks like Akamai which rely on anycasting at bottom DNS layer and simple unicasting on application servers. Anycasted DNS nodes point to application servers based on various factors like distance, load, cost etc out of interesting algorithms these CDN networks use for load & cost management.   Anyways today’s post focus is not CDN issues with these resolvers but Google Public DNS itself. Are these servers located in India and everywhere else where Google has PoPs?   Let’s do a simple trace to get forward path from Airtel to Google’s 8.8.8.8:

And an interesting day full of bit frustrating drama. Today was “External viva” for Major Project at college. It went good with external teacher but “internal ones” tend to cause un-necessary issues. Quite a few people put personal egos and frustration on top priority to an extent that they violate their own points for which they are arguing. They go completely unethical in way they deal with world.

I am saying this with full responsibility for couple of teachers from my college who have completely lost some “fundamentals of life” as taught in childhood to most of us. Some key principles like staying cool & calm, being humble, making best possible use of time and just being good with everyone. In last 4 years they haven’t learn how to give respect & talk with sense and they expect students to be learning “technology” from them? What an absurd!

It’s late evening here in Radaur and I am sitting in my room with open door looking outside in dark. I wonder if darkness outside is more then darkness I see in our system. No, I am not referring to any routing glitch or bandwidth chock point but even more fundamental issue that is “Lost sense of Engineering” in current education age. It’s pretty hot weather out in my room. I will start this blog post with two interesting real life experiences from last few years.