Swaroop C H is 29 years of age. He is a coder and startupper. He has previously worked at Yahoo!, Adobe, his own startup and Infibeam.
Email: swaroop (at) swaroopch.com
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After recommendations in the comments of my previous posts, I used Picasa to brighten up the Ranga Shankara images (see previous post) using the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. It works so well!
It even created collages for me:
That is so neat. I can’t understand why they’re giving away that thing for free!
This was generated from Flickr photos using metaatem.net/words . The cool things you can do with web services…
Sidebar: Wanna ipod your photo?
Yesterday was Yahoo!’s 10th birthday party and has officially completed 10 years today 
.. the day started off with each of us getting a Y! branded bucket full of chocolates.
The Bangalorean Yahoos sponsor a National Child Labour Plan School and we had the kids come over in the morning as part of our celebration. About 50 kids had come and apparently, there was a Tom and Jerry show. I had come in around 11 (as usual) and saw the mail regarding this. I went downstairs to the 3rd floor and I see 50 kids shouting and playing and laughing, total chaos! It was good to be back in that school atmosphere. There were lot of games planned and about 7 of us came ad-hoc to help the kids have a good time.
There was drawing, bowling, basketball, skipping, throwing the hoop, playing with the big hoop (I forgot what this is actually called, this is where you have a big circular ring and you try to shake it with your hips), one kid did this really well and with such ease that we were jealous, and there were many other games as well. The fun lasted for about a couple of hours and then we had to force the kids to leave the games and go for lunch.
After we lunch, we tried to gather all the children. Avinash and myself had a hard time to shepherd all the kids but they were such a sweet bunch and they were so full of enthu that it made it easy. One particular kid won lots of pencils but he gave it back to Ankit and asked him to give to the teacher so that they can give it to the other children. That was so heart-rending and reminds me about the kind of life the kids previously had. Its not hard to imagine that these kids were forced to do child labour and had a hard life. They now have a school to go to and hopefully they learn to lead a good life as well.
We asked the kids to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Yahoo! and boy, can those kids sing loud! And I mean really loud. Even yahoos from the other floors heard it. (I had recorded the video of it but it was too big so I couldn’t upload it.) Then we finally gave an incentive (ok, ok, we totally bribed them) that if they studied well in school and made the teachers proud, then we would have more such parties for them. All this interaction was in Kannada since they don’t know English and Avinash did most of the talking ; he would make a good lecturer indeed 
This was followed by a treasure hunt ironically titled ‘The Great Yahoo! Search’. Each wing of each floor was a separate team. All I can say is ‘dhoondthey reh jaooge’ became our theme! 
We had really cryptic clues and we had a load of fun trying to figure out what they meant. For example, ‘One key to help us all, one bang to find it. One key to cool us all, one fire to fight it’… we struggled for half an hour on trying to figure that one. Think about this before you read the next few lines 
That one really had us scratching our heads. We looked in the refridgerator and lifted up fire hydrants. One of us even broke the fire alarm thinking a bang could lead us to the answer! That was a big ruckus, the security came running thinking it was an actual fire. The answer finally turned out to be a key on top of the tubelight next to the fire extinguisher and water cooler in the 2nd floor! This led to finally 4 more clues which we solved pretty quickly. By the time we finished the 3rd clue, one of the teams had already won, but that didn’t stop us from proceeding further. This was hell lot of fun and we had a lot of running around. A cool way of making us all get up from our seats I wish we can do more of such things. Big thanks to Shivku and Ankit for organizing this.
In the evening, we had a showing of the video depicting the 10 years of Yahoo! Its hard to imagine how 2 kids in a trailer in Stanford University with a bunch of computers with wires all around and clothes thrown all over the place led to the "biggest website in the world with 165 million registered users, 345 million unique visitors a month, $49 billion market cap, and a 62 percent increase in revenue last quarter , bringing 2004 total revenue to $3. billion".
There was a whole lot of laughs and funny moments in the video with David and Jerry telling their story. The most poignant moment was when Jerry explains that the yellow and violet colors were especially chosen because they were the most cheapest colors available when they were painting the office walls , and now they symbolize the vibrancy and colorful nature of the company.
At the end of the video, I realized how invaluable Yahoo! really is and how the Internet really means Yahoo! to many people. What started out as a simple directory of content on the internet has become the hottest destination for anything and everything from searching for jobs to looking after pets and of course my favorite parts – mail, calendar, addressbook and notepad. Yes, Google is in the limelight now (and for good reason) but let us not forget that Yahoo! does much more and there are more exciting things are on the cards in the coming months. What I find striking is that Yahoo! has had competitors in all the fields and yet each Yahoo! vertical has been consistently in the top 2 or 3 in each of the fields from mail to jobs to search and so on.
This was followed by chaats for the hungry and then the party started. The music was played by one of the DJs from Spinn. It was a long and hard party. I still have the beats sounding in my head. All in all, Yahoo! sure knows how to party and emphasizes what I term the Yahoo! way – ‘Work hard and party harder’
My friend Gopal V joined Yahoo! today. Welcome to the gang, Gopal! 
Gopal spoke about Parrot and DotGNU at Linux Bangalore/2004. He is one of the major contributors to DotGNU. He is also the admin of DotGNU. He is a true blue hacker and knows so much about VM and compiler internals stuff that he positively scares me
I travelled to Trichur (also called Thrissur) in Kerala on Friday to attend Renaissance 2005, a FOSS festival at GEC, Trichur, Kerala, India. The festival was conducted by the MCA students of GECT. It was a 3-day event but I attended only the 2nd day – I was there to give a talk on Python.
(Tip : Hover the mouse over the photos to get insightful info Also, as usual, click on it to see the bigger version of the photo )
The train arrived in Thrissur at 5 in the morning. Two of the students came to pick me up and took me in the big Tata Safari to the Government Guest House where I was lodged. Apparently, one of the ministers suddenly showed up, so I got bumped from an AC room to a non-AC room. Well, no big deal.
After a light snooze, I met with Shuveb Hussain of NatureSoft in Chennai. He was going to speak on High Performance Computing. We went down for breakfast together and we instantly hit it off. He was a delightful person. 4 years ago, he graduated from B.A. in Literature where he studied Shakespeare. Today, he was going to speak on clusters and kernel patches. Amazing, eh? It seems Linux and OSS excited him so much that he started to dabble in it a lot and eventually made a career out of it.
It was a government guest house, so most of the stuff, from the pillow to the plate, was branded with the famous "God’s Own Country" slogan
After breakfast, we still had some time left before our hosts had to pick us up. So, we went for a stroll and we came across a ‘pen hospital’ 
. Apparently, its very real and they do ‘heal’ pens. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be shocked. I remember from my last Kerala trip where I saw a building with its name ‘Hilarious Building’. Heh.
After that, we stopped to get a coconut. The coconut water was simply delicious and the white kernel was so thick! Well, after all, Kerala is the land of coconuts. I wish I could get such tasty coconuts in Bangalore. Then, we headed to the campus.
The GECT campus is really huge – over 100 acres! They teach almost every kind of engineering branch and have so many labs. I heard that GECT is one of the best engineering colleges in Kerala, probably next only to the Trivandrum engineering college.
There were some paper presentations going on in the main hall. These students were talking about ext3 file systems and optimization of IPC in the kernel and so on. Yikes.
There was a short break after the paper presentations got over and before the techie talks started. The HOD of the MCA department was sitting next to me and the nice lady was telling about the GECT college and I was curious about the college and stuff. She pointed out that one of the judges was Pramode C E, a well respected personality who teaches students in his own computer learning lab. I had heard a lot about Pramode previously from many students. I don’t think you can find a single CompSci or IT student in Kerala who doesn’t know about Pramode. He has also written many articles for Linux Gazette and Linux For You magazine. I planned to meet him later on.
The next thing I know, Pramode comes over to us and talks to Shuveb and myself. He looks at me and says ‘Hello BangPyper’ and then says ‘I am a big fan of your blog’. I was speechless. We three soon got talking about lots of techie stuff, everything from favorite distros to Python (of course) to our work and so on. I convinced him to join our BangPypers group as well.
Then, the talk on embedded Linux by Sree Kumar of NeST, Thiruvananthapuram started. He explained how Linux was taking the embedded market by storm and the kind of work his company was involved in. He gave a good overview of embedded Linux and tried to convince the students that a career in embedded Linux is very rewarding as well.
Next up was Shuveb who talked about high performance computing and clusters. It was interesting to hear about openMosix and other software which autodetects other computers in the network which are also running openMosix and automatically start to work as a cluster. No need to edit any sort of config file! He uses a cluster in his office environment and uses it for compiling lots of stuff and apparently, this setup gives a lot of performance.
It was 1 pm by now and a lunch break was due. The speakers were taken to a separate room (by the looks of it, a staff meeting room) and we were served lunch there. One of our hosts, Brajesh asked us to eat ‘without formalities’. I said ‘Well, you made it too formal already!’. I also learnt my first word in Malayalam – ‘Vellam’ means ‘water’.
After the sumptuous lunch, I had the formidable task of talking to students in the post-lunch session. I started off with finding out the programming background of the students. Majority knew C and C++. None knew Perl and about 3-4 knew Python (again, taught by Pramode). So, my task was a bit easier since explaining a dynamic language like Python is always exciting to a person from a static language background.
I talked with relative ease (having had quite a bit of practice in recent months and students seemed to be listening. I was worried that they were not asking questions but I ignored that for the moment. I could see the sparkle in the eyes of few students when I typed programs at the interpreter prompt and showed instant results. That’s exactly what I love about giving these talks.
The talk went on for about an hour and I am always surprised to see that Jython and IronPython make a significant eyebrow-raising experience for students. The fact that you can write Python programs and run it on all the three – native (i.e. C), Java and .NET platforms, seems to be a big plus point for everyone.
We finally had the Q&A session and I then faced a barrage of questions. The session lasted a good 15-20 minutes with questions like "Will Python take a chunk of the Java market ?", "What about it’s speed?", "What kind of people use Python a lot?" and so on. I was relieved after this session because the range of questions seemed to indicate that the students did listen to the talk and did become interested in Python.
I then went out of the main hall and decided to go for a stroll around the college. Two students followed me and volunteered to guide me around the campus. They kept calling me ‘Sir’ inspite of my request not to. (It seemed kinda strange to me for people older than or the same age as me to be calling me ‘Sir’).
As I had said earlier, the college campus is really huge. I would’ve loved to have studied in a college like this – big, full of greenery and lively. I came to know that the foundation stone was laid by Jawaharlal Nehru.
There are so many labs in the college including a ‘Fluid Dynamics lab’ (whatever that is)! They showed me the ‘MCA Tree’ where the MCA students hang out after classes (and even during classes ). Then there was the mini-forest inside the campus where the ‘coolest classroom’ (literally) was located. It seems the girls hostel is next to this side of the campus. No comments on that one.
I then went to the other hall where Pramode was going to give a talk and demo the Phoenix project. I had heard about this before and knew it had something to do with Physics but didn’t know much else about it.
Pramode introduced that PHOENIX stood for ‘Physics with HOme made Equipments and iNnovatIve eXperiments’. Nifty acronym. It was a electronic circuit designed by B. P. Ajith Kumar, a researcher working with the Nuclear Science Centre of India. It is designed as a general-purpose circuit to help students create experiments to understand and learn Physics, Electronics and much much more.
The idea of the Phoenix project is to provide a computer interface to the electronic circuit. This allows the student to write simple programs and manipulate the circuit and then observe the effects. Ajith Kumar has provided an interface in C. Obviously, it is difficult to expect a non-CompSci student to learn C and write programs for this. So, Pramode has written a Python interface to this program and now a student can write simple calls at the interpreter prompt and see results instantly!
He ran this program at the prompt:
[python] p = phoenix() p.write_outputs(’11111111′) [/python]
and then voila, the bulb was lit! This might seem boring to you now but try to think back as a student when you did your first experiments in the laboratory. This would’ve been fascinating to do then. Physics seemed too theoritical for me but projects like these can make a big difference. Pramode even showed how to use the setup as an oscilloscope by running a small TkInter Python program and showing the graph on screen real-time. Changing the wavelength changed the graph instantly!
One of the major plus points of Phoenix is that all the parts used to make the circuit are locally available and it costs just about 2000 rupees. Compare this to an oscilloscope which costs 20,000 rupees. Also, the Phoenix circuit board design, the C API and the Python API are all free for everyone. Anybody can contribute further to the project as well. This is the power of free and open source software and this is an example of innovative projects in India at the same time.
Pramode has written a full article at Linux Gazette about Phoenix.
After an enlightening session on Phoenix, the fest part of the day was over. I took a few snaps of our wonderful hosts and the girls who took care of the speakers as well as the speakers ourselves.
The guys – Ragesh, Arun, and others (our hosts) offerred to take Shuveb and myself to the Central shopping mall in Thrissur. This part of the city looked like MG Road and Brigade Road to me. Lot of hustle-bustle and commercial shops here. The Central shopping mall looked like the kind of place where all the cool kids hang out. We had dinner in one of the hotels in the mall and the 5 of us enjoyed talking about lots of stuff and joking around.
Then, it was finally time for me to catch the bus back to Bangalore. My only regret was that I couldn’t stay back another day. Ragesh told me about a good trekking place just 2 km from Thrissur. Damn, I missed that! The guys have already invited me for Renaissance 2006 in advance
To summarize, a lot can happen in a day!
Also, the complete set of full-size photos is in my Renaissance 2005 photoset.
After Saturday’s long Python talk, we returned to the guest house in the evening and I simply crashed on the bed and had a great sleep.
On Sunday morning, I was woken up by Dilip saying ‘Hey, its 9 am. We have to go trekking!’. In an hour, we were on a jeep travelling 34 km to Thusharagiri. The weather was good, not too hot but with a bit of humidity, after all, this is Kerala. We had a look around the place and saw the boards which said there were 5 waterfalls. The first three were ‘nearby’ and the last 2 were 5 km and very far away. In fact, they are restricted since the area is prone to wild animals. So, we decided to go for only the first three waterfalls.
So, the four of us – Dilip, Praveen, Pradeep and myself started on our ‘walk in the hills’. Praveen had been to Thusharagiri before on a NSS trip and was our official guide for the day. That guy has amazing memory! He knew every turn and even once mentioned that one particular tree had more flowers when he had come last time.
(Update on 2008 Jan 27: Since the demise of Yahoo! Photos, the photos are now available in this Flickr set)
This place was the most unpolluted place I’ve ever been to in my life. I simply loved it!
The noise of water happily flowing was the only sound we could hear. We hardly saw any other instance of humanity (yeah, bad geek joke). The pure fresh air made my lungs tingle. The slippery paths made our walk difficult. Mother Nature in her true beauty made it all worthwhile.
We came across plants and trees of all sorts of species, including a coffee plant. The coffee flowers were beautiful, we plucked and chewed on the coffee seeds… we came across a tiny branch of the tree which was sort of what Tarzan would’ve used to swing from tree to tree. We had our own turn to achieve the same. Needless to say, I was afraid I would pull down the tree, so I didn’t pull too hard … we saw a jackfruit tree and what we suspected to be a ‘ganja’ tree as well..!
After a few more miles of walking, we came across some beautiful flowers… we were soon at the second waterfall. There were a few other college kids there as well. On the other side, we noticed a snake below… one of us shouted ‘Python Python!’ but Pradeep corrected saying it wasn’t a Python since they don’t have long tails….!
In the midst of nature, totally in the wild, I am so happy that I’m far away from all the pollution, the honking of cars, the traffic of the city…. and suddenly the mobile phone rings! Dilip had a BSNL phone and it actually had network coverage in such a remote place as this. Welcome to a networked India!
By now we were really really tired… we had walked nearly 6-7 km on a tough terrain! It was 3 pm and we were really hungry and in this long and amazing trek, we talked a lot and it was mostly Pradeep and myself talking about life in an IT company and the career. We were trying to give them advice and help them get a perspective of life… I think we ended up scaring them! 
… ok, seriously, we had a good talk about everything… as usual, Pradeep and myself got philosophical at times as well… I blame the breathtaking scenery for that
We finally reached our destination… the other 3 went and just fell on the bench there… I was distracted by the beautiful garden and took a lot of snaps there.
We then got back in the jeep and headed back to the guest house. After an hour of deep sleep, we packed our bags and headed for Calicut… we entered one of the bakeries, tempted by the specialties we practically bought half of the store leaving behind a smiling shopkeeper… we got on the train, bid goodbye to Dilip and Praveen (a big thanks to you two for a great time!), and on the way back, Pradeep, myself and Atul Chitnis had a great conversation and we talked about so much stuff… from Indian politics to open source (of course)…
We reached Bangalore on Monday morning, I had taken the day off from work but I still didn’t stay at home. A very close of friend of mine has come down from Mumbai and we spent the whole day doing lots of things… after 3 amazing non-stop fun days…. how can anyone get back to office and actually work!
Note : See my Yahoo! Photos for the complete set of full-size photos. There are lots of wallpaper-quality stuff in there 
I’m blogging from a Ubuntu Linux desktop in the awesome 24-hours Computer science lab in NIT, Calicut. This place is so big!
Coming back to the event that we had come for – the FLOSS Meet @ NIT Calicut, it was very successful and we had a great time today.
Actually, the morning didn’t start out well for me, we didn’t travel in a good bus and we landed near IIM, Calicut at 4.30 am , we then took an auto rickshaw and reached the NIT Calicut campus. We had a few hours of sleep and then we got up groggily and had to get ready to give a talk on stage!
We had a small inauguration function on stage. I’ve seen many inauguration functions where you have the names put up in front of the seats on stage and we usually clap at the speeches and stuff but I never expected my name to be on such a platform!
Dr. S S Gokhale (the director of NIT Calicut), Dr. K P Mohandas (Professor at NIT Calicut) and Mr Sudhakar (Vice President of CSI) were the dignatories on stage. We were then introduced to the audience and some background info on where we studied, whats our interests, etc. was mentioned.
There were some 140-150 students in the auditorium. It was good that we got the first turn to give the talk since the students are fresh in the morning and are usually more retentive. After all, we all have been students at one time and understand the psyche of a student.
Soon, Pradeep and myself took over the stage and we started asking the students about what their previous programming experience and what they are interested in. Almost all students knew C++ and didn’t know Perl. So, yaay! They hadn’t been spoilt by Perl and we knew it would be exciting to introduce them to a clean language like Python to C++ students.
We gave a pep talk to them that Python is used in the real world. In fact, Yahoo! Groups runs on Python and also Pradeep’s company ZeOmega deliver real-world solutions for hospital management.
The first thing we showed was the Python’s interpreter prompt. You can always see the sparkle in the eyes of anybody new to Python when you show them that you can type code on the prompt and get back results immediately. We then talked about the other basic stuff like indentation, more syntax stuff, functions and more importantly, the ‘Pythonic’ way of approaching things.
We two had actually one plan – do a better Miguel-and-Nat act than Miguel and Nat. Well, I think it’ll suffice to say that we may not have beaten them at their own game but we did pretty well. We were having fun on stage and explaining things at the same time. We were giving an example of a college marks card application and our marks was like this:
[python] students = {
'Swaroop' : [60,70,80],
'Pradeep' : [40,40,40]
} [/python]
Needless to say, the students laughed and enjoyed it. Before we knew it, one and a half hour was up and we took a tea break. Then, we talked about OOP and classes and then some cool Pythonic stuff such as list comprehensions. After that, Pradeep talked about his company ZeOmega and their project Zepp which they plan to open source in the coming weeks. I then asked whether anybody was not aware of Yahoo and of course, nobody raised their hands, so I didn’t talk about my company
Yahoo! had given me some T-shirts to give away to students. So, we asked some questions to students and whoever answered got a free Yahoo! ‘Open Minds Open Source’ T-shirt. We asked questions like ‘Who is the current maintainer of Linux’ and ‘Which is the only BSD-based LiveCD’ to ‘Which was the first Linux distro ever’ and ‘Who was the founder of GNU?’.
So, we rounded up the talk and were happy that the talk went well. I usually measure a good talk by the number of doubts and questions asked – it means that the audience is listening to you and digesting what you are saying. We took questions throughout the talk and answered them immediately.
Then, we had a lunch break. This was followed by Shanker Balan talking on FreeBSD and Atul Chitnis giving an energetic talk on the philosophy of FLOSS. I especially liked the way he emphasized that open source is a process, not just a product.
This was followed by a demonstration of Slynux by Sarath Lakshman. It was cool to see a 15-year old demonstrating his customized distribution of Linux.
I want to mention Dilip and Praveen who are students of NIT, Calicut and took the initiative to organize this FLOSS event. Congrats to them for making it a great success
I think I better stop writing now. Its almost midnight and we are going trekking in the hills and see water falls tomorrow morning at Thusharagiri
Note : I will put up the photos and presentation when I get back to Bangalore on Monday.
Update : I have finally uploaded the full collection of photos. Also, here’s the presentation titled ‘Slither away with Python’.
Gadling’s photo of the day is a snake charmer in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. No, seriously, I’m not talking of Pythonistas, I’m talking about a real snake charmer!
Maybe this can be the official logo for BaPy ?
Update: ‘BangPypers’ seems to be the frontrunner for the name of the group!
As I had announced yesterday, we had a Python meetup at Ebony Restaurant today evening — Ten Pythonistas arrived and we had a rockin’ time
I knew only Pradeep and Premshree before, I met the other 7 just today – Anand Pillai, Sundar, Owen, Suresh, Anish, Ramdas and Gurpreet.
We met up at 7.30 and just started talking away! We eventually got around to giving our formal introductions. It was interesting to listen to the stories of how each of us became interested in Python and how we have come to like it so much. There were equal number of newbies, Python users and experienced guys amongst us. Most of us use Python ‘unofficially’ for our own purposes except for Pradeep and Gurpreet who use Python professionally in their respective companies.
After the introductions, we soon ordered the drinks and snacks. The conversations veered off in all kinds of directions from Linux Bangalore/2004 to Ruby on Rails (no, we don’t bash other languages, its just that we simply love Python) to the writing habit in us – Premshree, Anand and Pradeep have written various Python-related articles in many magazines, including the respected DeveloperIQ magazine whose publisher and editor is Ramdas ; and relatedly I have written a popular free book on Python.
Then came the topic of organizing ourselves into a tribe of snake-charmers. Oops, I meant a group of Python users . We decided to create a yahoo group for ourselves but we soon got brainstorming and debating about a suitable name. For obvious reasons, we were trying to come up with names which involved ‘Python’ and ‘Bangalore’ … some of the names that came up were BagPython, BangPython (!), BaPy, PyBang, …. we finally decided ad-hoc on the name ‘BaPy’ but we’ll still probably have a poll for it (and no, ‘Bang-athon’ is not a suitable name ). We can call ourselves as ‘bapys’ (try pronouncing it like ‘hippies’ )
Then, there was a suggestion to take on a project that all of us could take part in. It would be so cool if a group of Pythonistas from Bangalore, India could contribute to the Python community (and yes, anybody is welcome to help in the project, not just Bangaloreans)
I gave the suggestion of a CPAN equivalent for Python. This idea came out of a question I’ve had for quite a long time. If you’re a Perl user, you would know how CPAN allows super-easy installation and upgradation for Perl modules ; but Python does not have any equivalent. Ruby, which is much newer than Python has Ruby Gems! So, it was surprising to me that Python does not have any equivalent, even though there are many modules and packages available for it, many of which are listed in the Python Package Index (PyPI). Note that PyPI is only a listing of packages, it is not a central repository.
I was happy to note that everybody agreed that it was a viable idea, something do-able, something of interest to everybody and useful to the community at the same time. Premshree pointed out that it is not a difficult thing to implement but the more important thing to watch out for is to do it the right way. Ramdas volunteered to provide the webspace hosting and bandwidth for the project as well.
All of us are excited that we would get to work on a cool project we could hack on. However this is just our first meetup and we didn’t want to jump in right away with this. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was unanimously elected to be the lead for this project!
Our conversations continued and we got to know about the kind of work that each of us are into in their respective companies which were Yahoo!, Thoughtworks, ZeOmega, DeveloperIQ, Infosys, Computer Associates, Textual Analytics India. We inevitably got into a vim-versus-emacs discussion, how can a meetup be complete without it and then later we had a VIM-and-emacs-versus-IDE discussion.
Somewhere in-between, we managed to gulp in some food as well. We had a great time and lots of discussions, the reason why I coudn’t click more photos as well
Thanks to Anand Pillai for taking up the initiative to organize this meetup. I’m looking forward to the list/yahoo group that we are going to create and more exciting discussions that will take place on the list. If you are interested, please feel free to join the group as well. Anand will setup the group in the next few days and I will announce the same on my blog.
Update : As Richard mentions, there are discussions on catalog-sig regarding the ‘CPAN for Python’ project (I am reading the archives of the list).
Today, I discovered the degree confluence project website and have been mesmerized ever since .
The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here.
There are nearly 40,000 photos from 159 countries!!
I especially like this photo taken at NW of Mohaka, S of Lake Waikaremoana, N. Island, New Zealand.