All posts by Ruturaj Vartak

Biking

Thokarwadi Dam Bike Ride

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May 15, 2011
Another weekend, another shot @ biking. This time it was Thokarwadi Dam, Kamshet, Taluka Maval, District Pune.

The long winding road after the left @ Kanhe village just 7km ahead of Kamshet took us through a long tar ribbon bordering the parched dams of Nethersule and Thokerwadi

Thokarwadi Dam Bike Ride

Thokarwadi Dam Bike Ride

Directions

  1. Take NH4 (Mumbai – Pune) towards Kamshet
  2. Take a left at Kanhe village after Kamshet


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Trek, Biking

Ratangad Trek

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I love my state, Maharashtra. Recently had been to this lovely little trek (only 2 hours for climbing) of Ratangad, BUT … BUT a very long way to the base village, Ratanwadi.

The path to Ratangad was showered with the lovely hills, mountains en-route through one of the loveliest lakes in India, The Bhandardara lake (Wilson Dam). The road winds through the Igatpuri range, first roaming around some of the virgin hills and then through the emperors, starting with Kalsubai. The pinnacle with a small hump at the very top, a very distinguishable feature, keeps overlooking your ride/drive right till you climb Ratangad.

The base of the mountain, Ratanwadi is a small village of not more than 200 dwellers. It has an ancient temple, Amruteshwar along the banks of the Bhandardara lake. The village itself is on the opposite end of the Dam, hence about 1/2 hrs boat ride from the dam or 20km of ride from the Dam. The lake at the village provides with perennial water supply and free natural swimming pool unmatched in its beauty, surrounded with peaks of Kalsubai, Ratangad.

From the top of Ratangad, one can view the adjacent magnificence of the Sahyadri Range, next to Kalsubai are Alang, Madan, Kulang mountains (one of the difficult climbing routes – for guys like us). On the otherside is the intimidating “Ajoba”

Ratangad Pics



More Ratangad Pictures

Travelling Directions

  1. Get to Igatpuri Station (Central Railway)
  2. An early morning bus to Bhandardara (around 5.00am)
  3. Boat ride to Ratanwadi

Linux

Freeing up RAM (memory) in Linux

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Very often I used to find that my Linux box(s), Fedora & Ubuntu both started reserving more RAM over a period of time since its boot. And the actual RAM left free was less.

I knew it was holding some caches for itself so that it could find the programs loading “quickly” and something like that (Sorry for my newbie language).

The most common way to free up RAM is Rebooting! But I wanted to avoid it, so did a little “googling” and I came up with an interesting solution – Tell linux to flush all the caches.

# Flush file system buffers by executing
sync;

# free page cache
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches;

# free dentries and inodes
echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

# free page cache, dentries and inodes
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

I’ve created a simple bash script, which u can download.

References

  1. http://www.linuxarticles.org/2010/10/release-memory-in-linux-unused-or-cached/
  2. http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/faq/linux-mem.html

MySQL

MySQL 5.5 (aka superfast InnoDB) is GA

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Oracle has finally announced the long time pending MySQL 5.5 as GA. The 5.5x branch has the following super improvements.

  • Super Fast & Stable Innodb: Code from Innodb plugin 1.0.4x onwards, Multiple Read and Write threads for Innodb, Native Async I/O in linux. more…
  • Semi Synchronous Replication: Ability to make sure the data committed to master has atleast reached one Slave Node: more…
  • .. and more fixes.

uuhhoooo.. !!!

Biking

Ganpatipule Bike Ride (Photo Post)

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Photos

Route / Directions

Mumbai – Vadkhal (Junction where u split either towards Panji/ Ganpatipule OR Alibag)
Vadkhal to Indapur
Indapur – Kashedi (Kashedi is one of the longest Ghat in the whole route)
Kashedi – Chiplun
Chiplun – Sangameshwar
Sangameshwar – Chiplun DO NOT TAKE THE FIRST RIGHT TO GANPATIPULE AFTER SANGAMESHWAR TAKE THE RIGHT AFTER THE NIVALI GHAT (निवळी)
Ganpatipule – Jaigadh (via Malgund)