I was invited back to Thrissur to present a talk to engineering students. Since I didn’t want to give the same ol’ introductory Python talk at the same place, I decided to talk about TurboGears, since that’s been pretty much the only new thing I’ve had time to explore off late.

I left in a train on Thursday afternoon, reached Thrissur on Friday morning, left again on Friday evening, and back in Bangalore on Saturday morning, and I had so much fun in-between all that.

I have a lot to write about this event and the various talks and demonstrations that were happening. However, Pramode has such a good writeup about Insignia ’05 that I didn’t feel the need to write about it myself.

Also, I don’t have any pictures from this event since I forgot my digicam when I was hurriedly packing to reach the railway station on time.

Note: I will be speaking on TurboGears at foss.in/2005.

Looks like the first shortlist of talks for foss.in was not enough, we now have the first list of special speakers: Jeremy Zawodny, Harald Welte, Brian Behlendorf, Rasmus Lerdorf, Dave Phillips, Danese Cooper, Alan Cox (yes, I said Alan Cox)… the list is impressive!

Inspite of the “IT is India’s Tomorrow” slogans, Purnima explains why agriculture is still the future of India.

(via DesiPundit)

Has anybody else noticed that PodBazaar, (the site that aims to be the premier site for Indian podcasts), was created using Lisp!?

A while ago, we had a puja in our home and we were going to have a huge gathering of our close family. My mom wanted to give out music CDs to everyone as a mark of remembrance of the occasion. Dad reminded us that we can’t distribute songs without permission. That’s where I stepped in and said “No problem, that’s why we have the Podsafe Music Network.”

So, in a single night, I digged up some really pleasing instrumental music from the Podsafe Music Network as well as the Magnatune website.

Here are the 13 songs that were recorded (on the 150 CDs):

1. ‘Melody’ by Johnny Owl

2. ‘Loved Ones’ by Jazperience

3. ‘Cold Cloth and an Ice Pack’ by Derek K. Miller

4. ‘Serenity’ by Julie Melton

5. ‘My Friend’ by Denis Kitchen

6. ‘Lillian (A Portrait in Sound)’ by Jim Fidler

7. ‘On The First Day’ by Septology

8. Merrigan’s Reel by Jim Fidler

9. ‘Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C Major, BWV 846: Fuga’ by Daniel Ben Pienaar

10. ‘Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 847: Praledium’ by Daniel Ben Pienaar

11. ‘Adagio Sonata for Oboe and Basso Continuo in F (Besozzi)’ by Gonzalo X Ruiz

12. ‘Premier Recreation de Musique (Leclair)’ by Brook Street Band

13. ‘Triemer Six Cello Sonatas’ by Ensemble Mirable

(Note that I had downloaded the Jazperience songs from the old mp3.com and it was under a shareable license as well)

The latter half of these songs are from Magnatune – I was happy to see a good collection of songs that are not “mainstream pop and R&B”, as well as freely allowing the songs to be downloaded under a Creative Commons license. Their slogan “We are not evil” kicks a**.

Many relatives told my mom that the songs were good and they liked it. Here’s three cheers to this vision of music being the universal language of openness and culture.

Sidebar: The Amarok Live CD features the Amarok music player playing licensed songs from Magnatune, as soon as you put the CD in your computer.

Sidebar 2: Courtney Love’s article on “piracy” is very revealing about how the music industry works.

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This time it was Madhugiri Hill.

Ashok Banker has started a new novel called The Vortal that’ll be released online in episodes format. The blurbs remind me of Jumanji, but knowing Banker’s writing style, he will have some fast-paced stories ready.

There are already 4 parts posted.

Love what you do. Do what you love. If not, then what’s the point?

Somebody pointed to this in our intranet. From the Gaim website :

I (Sean) have been hired by Google, moved to Seattle, and have been working on the Google Talk team for about a month and a half. The goal of Google Talk is to make real-time communication as open as possible, and in that regard, I’ve been working to offer all of Google Talk’s features into other clients. Currently, I’m working on making it as easy as possible for other clients to use Google Talk’s voice features. You can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk’s voice features in the near future.

On a related note, the gaim-vv project—which aimed to offer a framework for voice and video support in Gaim—is being merged back into Gaim proper for hopeful incorporation into Gaim 2.0.0. This will be used to support Google Talk’s voice as well as MSN and Yahoo! webcams.

Wow! I was praying for something like this to happen.