Atul Gupta's Blog

I am no longer blogging here, but have shifted to Medium

https://medium.com/@atulgupta_20652 

Along with purchase of new cars, Govt has made it mandatory to issue FASTag sticker. The idea is to shift more and more people to use these automatic toll payment tags, then having to wait in long queues on the highways.

All that is fine, but if only things work so smoothly ð. When a buy a new car, the dealer goes ahead and registers it with FASTag. In my case it was ICICI FASTag. While it is the vehicle registration number that should be fed in their system, but since the new car hasn't yet b...

The Swaminarayan Hindu Temples were started by Swaminarayan, as part of his Swaminarayan sampraday and promote his philosophy of belief in God and idol worship. The most known and fascinating attribute of any Swaminarayan temple is the architecture, and in many cases, the overall construction spread across acres of land. These temples are not just in India but are found worldwide.
We recently visited the one in Pune at Narhe and true to its name, this one is also beautifully made. If coming f...

I have earlier shared detailed experience with regards my passport renewal here. Now it was time for my daughter's passport renewal. She is yet to be 18, and hence is a minor as yet. Few years back, for minors, there was no need to take an appointment at a passport seva kendra (PSK), but it seems now that is not the case. Appointment is mandatory, and being minor, one of the parents needs to accompany the child. 

The process is similar to what i have shared in my case. Login into the pass...

If you are using Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), you have an option of using Azure Reserved Instance (RI) VMs instead. Microsoft (MS) claims these can help save up to 72% of your spend. While this may be true on the surface, but it will be good to get a deeper view to understand what benefits you really stand to make, if at all. Yes, using reserved instances, doesnât automatically means cost saving.

It is hence important to understand how this works and plan accordingly to get the right kind of...

The other day, we were at a restaurant having lunch and there was another family sitting near by, who had this cute little daughter. She must be around 4-5 yrs old. Was happily eating and once done started to generally walk around the place. 

She came and stood by our table for a min to see what we were eating, then went to roam around the restaurant and event stepped outside, all the while mingling with the staff at the place. Surprisingly, during this entire duration (of maybe about 10-...

A few days back I had heard about the Android Oreo update finally being rolled out in India for Moto G5S Plus. I immediately went to the System Updates to check for it, but there was none :-(. But the news did say that it is being rolled out in phases. So it was wait and watch. 

Today morning I say the System Update notification and I immediately started the download. Took a few hours, given the size of the download was a little over 1 GB. The installation was to take about 30 min, as per...

It started off as a meeting with select few people, due to limited time that our CEO, Phani, had during his India trip, but then we decided to invite all. After all there had been lot of new people in the team and many had not met each other. The team is spread across Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Jalgaon, Ludhiana etc. (we work from home most of the times)
Our team of 4 from Pune initially thought to be a bit adventurous and thought of driving down to Bangalore, a journe...

In this era of online world, being connected all the time is an expectation that all of us have. Being off the network for a few moments is almost like we aren't able to breathe. Checking WhatsApp messages every few minutes is the way of life and if there are no new messages, it is almost like a depressing feeling.

From a time 'what is internet?', to having multiple connections at home, now, is very common. These connections would be in the form of a broadband/cable internet/wi fi router at ho...

What's it with this grace marking system that CBSE and possibly other boards follow? There was a decision taken by the board recently about no longer giving grace marks. While on the face of it this is a good decision, as it means students will really get marks as per what they have answered in the exam and not get extra marks, which helps boost their results, but was it really so? 

Delhi High Court has ruled against it and for all the valid reasons. However this raises a few questio...