Cricket on your desktop
I’m not a cricket buff but the IPL had got even me hooked. Well, at least during dinner. But for people who are crazy about cricket and want to follow ball-by-ball updates and certainly don’t like refreshing horrible-looking websites, then you might find Cricket Nirvana’s CricketCentre interesting:
The best part is that it runs on your desktop.
The good part is the range of functionality - real time ball-by-ball score updates, full scorecards, wagon-wheel and what not statistics, you can throw flowers or tomatoes at the cricketer of your choice and most of all, it pops up a GTalk-style notification for important events like a sixer, four or a batsman gets out!
The bad part is that the look and feel is too kiddish for my taste and the UI needs to be more simplified.
Back to the plus points, my favorite part is the mini-score card mode which will show up on the bottom-right corner of your desktop:
This idea was conceived and (as far as I know) executed entirely by
Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, Srinivas
Annam,
Arun Madas and many others in the Adobe Flex team in Bangalore. If
this isn’t cool stuff happening in India dev centres, I don’t know
what
is.
And what better way to show off AIR’s capabilities 
I know they have had some tough times in convincing cricket websites about this idea, but it’s good to see it finally out.
Sharavathy Valley Day 2
I thought I would get a damn good sleep in the night because I was so tired. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. Not with the snorers around. On top of that, it was so cold and I didn’t have a jacket. I kept tossing and turning all night.
At 4.30 am of Day 2 (June 01 Sunday), I was jolted by a shrill cock-a-doodle-doo sound. Soon enough, our leader Narayan woke us all up. I was surprised to see everybody get up immediately. At around 5.30 am, we all went out in search of sighting some animals. Unfortunately, we were too loud to get to see any animals. Even our footsteps, especially when crushing leaves, were loud enough to alert the sensitive-eared animals. Our guide who was in front saw some bisons but they ran away in lightning speed. I didn’t know they could do that.
We were soon enough on top of another hill and got to see another beautiful view. Heh, I’m such a landscape-voyeur.
And it was funny to see the things we do for poses in photographs.
What was amazing though was we could see islands in the Arabian Sea.
And then Narayana found viper snakes! These are poisonous snakes and one bite could have been fatal for any of us.
Sharavathy Valley Day 1
For a while now, I was annoyed by the fact that it has been more than a year and a half since my last trek. So when I saw a call for people who want to join a trek in Shimoga in the Orkut Bangalore Trekkers group, I jumped at the chance.
A few days later on May 30 night (i.e. last weekend as of this writing), I was on a bus to Sagar in Shimoga district with 13 other strangers I had never met before. Thankfully, all it took was a few smiles and laughs and we got along very well. There were people from varying age groups - 18 to 55 although majority were the young IT crowd.
Then the inevitable happened. Bangalore traffic jam. It took 2-2.5 hours just to get out of the city! There are so many bottlenecks especially near the Jalahalli cross. No wonder the bus drivers are so stressed out. God save us all, I wonder how much worse it can get. Because of all this hungama, we reached Sagar more than a couple of hours late which threw our trekking plans haywire. We had to ditch the idea of trekking till the Belli Gundi waterfall and do a shorter exploration of the area.
To start the day (May 31 Saturday), we got into an open jeep to transport us to Kattinakaru. We had a fun ride through the scenic locale. We even saw the Linganmakki dam from far.
Smart Techie Startup City
Yesterday, I attended The Smart Techie Startup City event. It was intended as a showcase of startups as well as for learning/sharing/mentoring.
I had taken some notes during the day. As I was expanding it into a blog post, I realized I was just adding filler words which was a waste of bits, so here it is as-is:
- Ashish Gupta, Helion VC on “Concept to Success : Milestones for
startups”
- India is a startup (positive way of looking at things)
- High energy
- Lots of growth
- Small absolute number (relatively)
- Little infrastructure or process
- Lack of talent
- Lots of optimism
- Need to innovate to survive
- ⇒ Once in a lifetime opportunity
- Significant change in dynamics (negative way of looking at it)
- Whatever can be made efficient will be done so.
- We can in turn get bangalored and some other country will benefit.
- Creative folks will thrive.
- ⇒ We have no choice.
- Whatever can be made efficient will be done so.
- Hardest evolutionary steps
- Those that requires behavior change
- For example, starting to think “Become cash flow positive”
- Next level CEO, process, tech, business model, etc.
- Those that requires behavior change
- Put in place metrics to measure everything - will help identify whether one has already hit an inflection point.
- Rules of thumb
- Focus on customer/issue
- Focus on continuous improvement
- Intellectual honesty
- Results matter - only for MEASURING (measure progress on a larger scale)
- ⇒ Same rules for person, family, company
- India is a startup (positive way of looking at things)
Avenue Road
People often say there’s nothing much to see in Bangalore. But if you get to know some of the old parts of Bangalore, you’ll slowly start to see something special. Avenue Road is one such place:
This mini documentary was created by my friend Vineetha who was a business analyst at an IT software services company some time back and today is a journalist at CNBC!
The Sunfeast 10K run
I did the Sunfeast 10K Open Run today. I finished in 1 hr 10 min 26 sec. Finally, a timing I am happy about.
Best of all, it was a good run. I didn’t have any of my usual performance anxiety symptoms, mostly because I made sure that I didn’t plan or think about the run. I’d just get up late, hurry and reach the place, just wait to run and hope everything goes well.
I’m thankful that it worked out exactly to a T and it was a good run. A really feel-good steady-pace run.
I needed an extra boost in the end to bear the searing sun and that was provided by “Get Up! Go Insane!”. Thanks Fatboy Slim!
There were people running for their charities, people running for fun, people running in costumes, and even people running out of curiosity. I was running to fight against my off-late tendency to give up easily.
On a different note, I must appreciate how well-organized the entire event was. After the run, they gave everyone bun and biscuits. It may not mean much in a normal situation, but after a run, it’s really important and I was thankful they had thought to this level of detail.
After I came out of the Kanteerava stadium (the start and end point of the run), I bumped into an old school mate after a really long time. He looked at me and asked:
Him: Oh so you came for the run?
Me: Yeah
Him: So you completed?
Me: Yeah…
Him: (has the ‘not bad’ look) So how long did you take?
Me: 70 min.
Him: Oh. (face expression changes) I took 90 min. Okay. cya later.
So next time, don’t underestimate that fat people can’t run.
Running is the greatest metaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into it.
– Oprah Winfrey
Biking to Ooty
It all started on Monday last week when Lakshman tweeted if anybody was game for a weekend trip. Ashwin tweeted back saying yes.
Later they asked me over email. My reply was “Why Ooty!?”. They replied saying “It doesn’t matter. We’re going for the drive.” Two days later, we three were driving to Ooty on bikes at night.
My descriptions below are in twitter style as an ode to how the trip
happened. ( But of course, my usual writing style will resume after
this post )
We started off at 8 at night. First stop was some lip-smacking food at Kamat Lokaruchi:
9.10 pm : We’re on the way! 3 twitterers on bikes.
9.25 pm : Getting out of Bangalore is the toughest thing.
9.30 pm : @scorpion032 says 2020 will also be the year of the linux desktop.
10.32 pm : @cruisemaniac and @scorpion032 are tweeting away…
1.40 am : Taking a break.
2.33 am : Admiring the mysore palace…
3.16 am : Sleep getting to me… But we’re taking breaks and having fun. In Nanjangud.
3.20 am : Another break.
3.34 am : Listening to My Sacrifice at 330 am at 70 kmph on bike with the wind in your hair is something to be experienced.
4.10 am : We find a freakin’ coffee day in the middle of nowhere. Waiting for capuccino.
6.15 am : Mudumulai forest.
6.20 am : Animals! Elephant, deer, peacock, mongoose, eagle, woodpecker, … All right there next to us… Thank heavens the elephant didn’t think we were pesky…
6.45 am : Exiting Mudumulai forest.
My favorite photo from this trip (notice the clouds and the bike):
Barcamp Bangalore 6 Day 2
Day 2 of Barcamp Bangalore No. 6 (Apr 20 Sun) started off on a pleasant note because I just had to stop and admire the greenery of the IIMB campus.
Had an impromptu discussion on development on Nokia Phones with Ashwin and another person who worked in Nokia. Surprised to hear that it costs so much!
Then, attended a session on “Pattern Labs” who are trying to create a better knowledge base for GAP, a conglomerate of NGOs for sustainable development. What they’re trying to achieve was quite admirable and definitely needed, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t understand what they’re trying to do in this Pattern Labs and what kind of software they’re trying to develop.
This was followed by a 5-10 min discussion on Web 2.0 for K-12 education, it was interesting to note that there were few success stories where kids used a wiki to collaboratively write a poem using the “diamond pattern” they teach in school and were benefited by this approach.
Then Rajiv Poddar initiated a discussion on the legal status of VoIP in India and why there should be a correction. Basically, VoIP calls cannot reach a PSTN/PLMN i.e. landline or mobile phones in India. Why? Because it will hurt VSNL’s revenues. An equally relevant issue is that VSNL is the only gateway in India trying to control all traffic for no real reason. But why is VoIP important? Because it makes phone calls damn inexpensive and there are many innovations that can be done around it - right from system integration to enabling live voice discussions for a website, all at a low cost.
Rajiv equated this situation to the telephony space - the government was afraid that BSNL won’t make money, but once the space was opened, everyone now knows the story of the rapid growth of telephony and communication in India, after all India is the fastest growing market. It did more good than harm.
Previously I had known that there are some legal issues with VoIP but had never ventured to learn about it until I happened to walk into this session. A group called Voice of VoIP was created on the spot to take the discussion forward and see if something can be done about it.
Then I went into a session on Scoping, Closures and Objects in Javascript. The speaker Venkatesh Choppella was a professor at IIIT, Trivandrum and held a Ph.D in computer languages. I was mighty impressed that there are such lecturers out there! Interestingly, he teaches JavaScript as the first language for some of his classes at his university. I learned a bit about JavaScript and language theory.
Then, Vinayak Hegde had an interesting session on High performance websites. Again, the crowd had a lively discussion on tips and tricks right from something called “CSS sprites” to using YSlow, Minify, Expires Headers, ETags, and so on.
And in between all this, I met many people. In fact, when we were mingling, few of us decided to go to the Coffee Day outlet in the next building to get something cold. It was such a sultry weather. And there we found, Shourya and another college student (Jayanth?) playing guitars and singing Def Leppard songs!
There were some amazingly funny and insightful discussions going on as well, many of which I can’t write here, but I’ll especially remember Kushal Das’ stories. I never thought someone had the guts to pull off giving an Intel 865 motherboard to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day! And they even have fights over GCC. Wow, that’s like a geek’s dream, right? Anyway, I wish him all the best, hope they’re together for a long time and more.
The day ended with a feedback session on the good, bad and ugly of Barcamp. Most people had suggestions and cribs but they said they got used to it once they understood the idea of how Barcamps work - it’s meant to be not organized and scheduled properly. Things should happen on-the-fly. And again, people asked for video archives of the sessions because they missed many due to the parallel tracks. Simple answer - get a video camera and record. If 4-5 people can volunteer, the problem is solved. The real problem is not enough people willing to do these things. Barcamp works only when everyone pitches in, whether you are initiating a session, volunteering or at least putting your name on the wiki.
There were more discussions, but in the end people agreed that the current format is great and nothing needs to be changed for number 7.
Bottom line: Adjust maadi. Don’t make it a “conference”!
There are only a few things that can get me high - running, passionate techie discussions, meeting new people, and interesting and insightful conversations. I had a good dose of all of these in two days, so BCB6 was simply well-spent time for me. And it looks like many other campers feel the same way as well.
P.S. If you want to be updated on when’s the next barcamp, just follow the mailing list and the website.
Barcamp Bangalore 6 Day 1
For the uninitiated, Barcamp is an “unconference” which means its a place where people meet, but all the usual rules of a conference do not apply (hence the ‘un’). The best part about any conference is usually the hallway crowds where people say hi and end up engaging in some of the most passionate discussions. Imagine if a conference had only hallway discussions as an agenda - You want to discuss something? Great, go write the topic on a post-it and stick it on the wall in the available time slots. That’s what Barcamp is.
Barcamp actually started off as a response to the FOOcamp i.e. Friends of O’Reilly Camp to which only the crème de la crème were invited and others had to stay out. So people like Tantek and Messina got together and decided to make a new “for the people, by the people” format which was the exact opposite of FOOcamp. And since programming has had “foo” and “bar” as standard variable names in examples, they called it “barcamp”. That’s right, it’s got nothing to do with alcohol. Now, Barcamps have become a worldwide phenomenon.
Day 1 of Barcamp Bangalore #6 (Apr 19 Sat) started with an introduction session where everyone stands up and explains what sessions they’ll be initiating at which room or “dari” and at what time. This itself was an indicator of how the next 2 days were going to be.
Since we techies are traditionally not used to getting up early on time, the sessions started half an hour late. In any case, the whole crowd started mingling.
The first actual session I attended was Kaashif demonstrating self-defence. Seriously. He explained that he has had unsavoury experiences at places like Marathahalli at night and its important to know how to defend yourself, not that you should go looking for trouble. He explained things well right from what are your opponents weak points regardless of their size to the three basic steps - do the defend action, do the ’shout/cry’ that happens when you hit with force, and then run.
For step 3, people had to come to our running discussion. That went better than I would have expected.
The rest of the day was of two parts for me - fleeting in and out of discussions and meeting people.
One thing about Barcamp is the no-holds-barred discussions. Diplomacy has no place here, let’s talk what you are really thinking. For example, there are many startups showcasing their products and taking feedback. One such startup that I witnessed was LifeInLines. The crowd, sorry to say this, literally murdered them. They were like “This is just twitter minus rss plus privacy controls. Is there anything else?” and the guys had a hard time convincing them of the value in their website. It reminded me of the recent discussion on Aren’t There Real Problems To Solve? Any way, I think this is the perfect reason why startups should showcase at Barcamp - you’re not going to get more brutal and more honest feedback than here.
Then I met a lot of interesting people. For example, Anand Bora who has an interesting passion called “mathematical art”. Wow, I didn’t even know such stuff existed. While we were talking, he scribbled something on a box and showed me, it was my name ‘Swaroop’. Then he turned the box around, it still read ‘Swaroop’! Wow again. Apparently, they’re called ambigrams and he’s done many of these. We had a long discussion about life and thoughts and where we’ll be in 5 years. And a few hours before that, I didn’t even know him.
Then bumped into people like Vid Ayer, Arun and a guy from Cisco, and they asked me about my ’startup’ experiences. This topic was a story by itself, so I’ll write about it separately. What was interesting, was putting faces to names. I’ve seen the name ‘Vid Ayer’ on mailing lists and blogs, but now I get to actually meet the person. This trend continued in the twitter meetup as well.
I think the ‘dari’ idea was awesome - just a bunch of carpets where people can sit and gather around. The discussions varied from “The Great Dating Session” to “Lessons from Kamasutra, not that kind” to writing Mozilla applications. Heck, even the sessions varied from raising awareness of the girl child issue to asynchronous i/o.
The only problem is that sometimes there were no topics of interest to me and sometimes there were 3 things happening in parallel and I wanted to attend all of them. But, yeah, that’s a problem that can’t be solved.
The whole day was fun. I couldn’t wait to get back to Day 2.
Why You Should Run
One fine day, I was running by myself. It was a few weeks before Barcamp Bangalore 5. I got an idea that I should talk about a non-techie topic at Barcamp since I’ve been giving tech talks for the past few years and I wanted a change of pace. I brainstormed many ideas on the reason for the talk, what to say and how to explain, etc. all during that one run.
Unfortunately I couldn’t attend BCB5. But I stored the notes in a safe place. And when BCB6 was announced, I wanted to be sure to talk this time around.
A few weeks back, Ramjee called me and asked whether we can talk about running. I smiled and thought to myself “Great minds think alike”. Or at least “Runners think alike”.
So I made a ppt and we landed at Barcamp on Saturday morning. We had never discussed the presentation. And we were going to give a session on it. Truly unconference style.
Note: The slides below have been modified to make it useful for a web audience. It has a lot more text now.
| DownloadBarcamp crowds are very inquisitive and so we didn’t actually go past half the slides, which is actually a good thing. Instead, we discussed a wide range of things about running right from finding good places to run to trouble with dogs.
In spite of the delays causing us to start at 12:45 (which means almost lunch time) the discussion went on till 1:45 and 90% of the 30-40 odd crowd were present till the end. When we went to grab what was left of lunch, lot of people asked us questions including how to avoid knee pain (tip: it’s the shoes). Since questions are always a good sign, I think it was a successful discussion.
We both still consider ourselves amateurs at running but at the end of the day its an activity we like and Barcamp is a perfect platform to talk about our passions.
Oh, and if you’re still not a believer, I’ll end with a quote:
Games require skill. Running requires endurance, character, pride, physical strength, and mental toughness. Running is a test, not a game. A test of faith, belief, will, and trust in ones self. So hardcore that it needs a category all to itself to define the pain. When game players criticize, it’s because they aren’t willing to understand, not because they’re stronger. Running is more than a sport; it’s a lifestyle. If you have to ask us why we run, you’ll never understand, so just accept.
– Jessica Propst
Update: SlideShare decided to make it a Barcamp spotlight presentation:
The online slides has had 1274 views and 116 downloads as of this writing (2008-05-04 Sun 10:04 PM).
Guess who?
It’s Ravana.
Watch the trailer if you don’t believe me.
… But their (Rohit Vaid and Abhimanyu Singh, of Contiloe Pictures) enthusiasm, love, and passion for the project hooked me. I signed on, despite myself. Surprising myself, my family, friends. And so Mahayoddha Rama was born, an animated film for viewers of all ages (it’s not just for kids, trust me) that aspired to match the quality of any international animated film, while aiming for a photo-realistic 3D animation style that hasn’t even been attempted yet here let alone achieved, and overall storytelling and production qualities that would make all of us proud–would make every Indian proud, in fact.
The script was gruelling. Yes, the film was based on the Ramayana of Valmiki. (Not on my Ramayana books–those are being adapted separately to live-action films by a Hollywood studio.)
… What we were trying was to reinvent the Ramayana for Indian filmgoing audiences, through the grammar of all-ages animation. Now that may seem simple at first, but it’s not. For one thing, there’s never been an Indian animation film that truly uses the grammar of animation. Sure, there have been the Hanumans and Bal Ganeshs, and the like, and they may even have done reasonably well, but they’ve essentially been compromises between low budgets and a dearth of creative courage.
Our attempt was much bolder: It was to create a film experience that wouldn’t simply retell Ramayana, but would reinvent it for a new generation.
Ashok Banker is a perfect example of how pure passion for a subject can show in amazing (literary) accomplishments and suddenly the world is a better place. At least, I am grateful to him for making Ramayana approachable, captivating and delightful to novel-readers like me. And now they’re bringing the Ramayana to audiences of this generation in a movie format. That is terrific news.
I hope I can stop being envious about Lord of The Rings. I hope we can claim that we too have our own amazing depictions of our traditional stories. And yes, the movie is in Hindi and is meant for an Indian audience.
After watching the trailer, I think it’s true that Indian animators can rock.
The movie is scheduled to be released nationwide in October-November 2008. Looking forward to it!
P.S. How can one resist such a movie if Gulshan Grover is the voice of Ravana and Sameera Reddy is the voice of Sita?
