Archive

Why read open source code?

I’ve never been a fan of new year’s resolutions because I feel they are doomed. And yet, the holidays are a good time to take a pause and really reflect. I’m thinking I want to read more open source code… Because accomplished coders did that via a

Back to IC

Two and a half years ago, I wrote about Engineering Management : Lessons learned in first year. It’s been more than a year since I have been back to an Individual Contributor (IC) role. So I have been reflecting on that. Why the switch back to IC? So why the

ML model monitoring

May 20, 2021 Kornel and I wrote about our team’s work on “Maintaining Machine Learning Model Accuracy Through Monitoring” on the DoorDash Engineering blog: Maintaining Machine Learning Model Accuracy Through Monitoring Maintaining-Machine-Learning-Model-Accuracy-Through-Monitoring-_-DoorDash-Engineering-BlogDownload Jul 23, 2021 I presented at Fifth Elephant MLOps conference on behalf of the Machine Learning

Interviewed by Managers Club

The interview is posted at https://www.managersclub.com/interview-with-swaroop-c-h-engineering-manager-at-helpshift/ → I talk about my biggest challenges, approach to hiring, advice for new managers, personal habits and that one book recommendation. managers_club_interview_swaroopchDownload

Interviewed by dev-to-manager

The interview is at https://devtomanager.com/interviews/swaroop-c-h/ I talk about my recent transition from developer to manager in this written interview. An excerpt: What do you tell developers who are considering making the switch or new to the role? Do not do this if you are not ready

Engineering Management : Lessons learned in first year

It’s winter season and am getting close to a year of full-time engineering management. So, I’m listening to some jazz house music and reflecting on what I have learned. While I have done tech lead roles before, this is the first role I’ve been doing people management

Stoicism

I read The Daily Stoic book by Ryan Holiday around a year ago. It changed my perception of reality with the very first page: Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that focuses on practical life instead of theoretical questions. It is concerned with everyday life and does not concern itself about

Exploring blockchain and smart contracts with Ethereum dev bootcamp, Blockchain@Berkeley

Background A few months ago, Mayank convinced me to get some Ether (Ethereum cryptocurrency) because it was going to go on a bull run, thanks to high-profile companies backing Ethereum by joining the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA). So I did. And that event did happen – including Microsoft, Intel, MasterCard, Cisco,

My experience with Udacity Deep Learning Foundation course

If you don’t know what is machine learning, just know this from Francois Chollet (creator of Keras)’s “Deep Learning with Python” book : After attending the AI Frontiers conference at the beginning of this year, I was amazed, fascinated and befuddled at what actually is machine learning and deep

Automatic acquired by Sirius XM!

NOTE: This story here is my personal perspective, it does not represent the views of my employer. 6 years ago, I worked with Thejo Kote on NextDrop. 5 years ago, I joined Thejo on his (then) next adventure, Automatic which launched 4 years ago, that story is here. The premise

Notes from AIFrontiers conference

My soothsayer friend BG told me last year that “deep learning is the next big thing”. I didn’t know what that meant. A few days ago, I attended the AIFrontiers conference in Santa Clara, California. Now I have a glimpse of what he meant :-) What is Intelligence? In

Using Spacemacs

In the past couple of months, I’ve been using and, a first for me, regularly contributing to this open source project called Spacemacs. Spacemacs is a new distribution of Emacs. Think what Ubuntu did for GNU/Linux – Spacemacs is doing the same for GNU Emacs. It combines all the

Load testing using Tsung

https://medium.com/helpshift-engineering/load-testing-using-tsung-ef26a662929b Load-Testing-using-Tsung-_-by-Helpshift-Engineering-Team-_-helpshift-engineering-_-MediumDownload

Eight programming lessons learned in 2013

Although it’s not yet the last month of the year, I was in a reflective mood, and jotted down programming lessons I learned this year: 1. Spend time first on what you’re going to do, iterate several times on the “plan”, and when you get to the computer,

NH7 Weekender 2013

NH7 Weekender 2013 Pune was fun. Well, I thought it was better music last year, but the festival is definitely worth visiting every year.   Nucleya, Madboy/Mink, Ankur Tewari & The Vinyl Records are the new discoveries for me this year. Started downloading some of their albums and playing their songs

Learning where to invest money from MoneyLife

Investing in property and gold is the first thing that comes to mind for us Indians when we want to invest money. But somehow I’ve always preferred finding out a more systematic way of figuring out how and when to invest. Bajaj Capital has been my financial advisor for

BGs Clojure Course Day 2

1 Pro Tip Pro Tip: Always set this in your REPL to prevent long data structures or infinite loops from hanging your REPL: (set! *print-length* 50) (set! *print-level* 10) 2 Workshop problem Starting the day with this problem: Given a text file, let’s find the n most common and

BGs Clojure Course Day 1

Continuing my journey of learning Clojure, I am attending BG’s Clojure Course. Today was Day 1. ~30 people in one room and BG as teacher for the weekend. Of course, I was looking forward to it. Most people in the audience had a background of mixture of C/C+

Khadakwasla Dam and Sinhgad Fort

Long ago, friends told us that Sinhgad Fort is a nice weekend getaway from Pune, finally, yesterday (Sunday) morning, we took out our getaway car and visited Khadakwasla dam and the beautiful misty land of Sinhgad. It was totally worth it.

Revamped isbn.net.in

Because of constant badgering from loyal isbn.net.in users (Navdeep, Chinmay, Hari, Sandip, Vidyaraj, Kartik, Vivek, Arjun, Leo, Ravi and others), I finally had to dedicate a weekend to fixing up isbn.net.in. However, instead of just fixing up the old code base, I rewrote it to use

Met Lakshmi Rebecca of “Chai With Lakshmi” fame

Ten months ago, Lakshmi Rebecca emailed me about her online talk show Chai with Lakshmi. I acknowledged her email and gave my standard reply of how this is a personal blog and I don’t do product reviews of any kind. At the same time, I forwarded the website to

[Tech] Why is “Database Layer as a REST API” not common?

We have “database APIs” such as abstraction layers over multiple SQL databases and ORMs. But why not take it to the next step and make it a REST API like any other network call that we can make? Advantages would be: * The sharing of database ORM models across multiple programming

[Travel] Hiking around Lake Chabot

Last Sunday, we hiked the 10-mile (15-16 km) Lake Chabot Loop with friends. It was amazing fun because of some new people we met, a beautiful lake and trail and it had been a long time since I had walked so much! (My legs informed me about that the next

[Travel] Monterey Bay

Last Saturday, we were hanging out with A R Karthick who was gracious to take us exploring the Monterey Bay – the three highlights for the day were: Mystery Spot was interesting and the strange phenomenon there could only be explained by some kind of magnetic force, we would literally stand

San Francisco

My wife and I are visiting San Francisco (I am here for the launch of Automatic) and in this past month, I have been experiencing San Francisco and the culture here. Obviously, this is all anecdotal but, hey, that’s what experiences are about. The first thing that I’ve

Automatic launched this week

The startup that I’ve been part of for more than a year has launched this week : Automatic – Your Smart Driving Assistant. It’s a hardware device + mobile app + cloud combination that helps you save money by helping you drive in a more fuel-efficient way, monitor your car engine’s

60/40 rule

From Lessons on Leading by Jessica Steel : Leaders recognize that we should feel 60% mastery and 40% stretch in our jobs at any given time. We draw our confidence from the 60% we know we’re nailing, and we grow from the challenge of the 40% that is new and

Micro targeting

Recently the Obama re-election campaign employed similar population-wide behavioral analytics to micro-target voters to ensure his re-election. There is no reason why we in India must not look to technology to devise ingenious methods for near real time data collection and population-wide analytics of social performance. This will not only

Review: Big Data Book by Nathan Marz

Recently, I finished reading the latest “early access” version of the Big Data Book by Nathan Marz. What is Big Data Let’s look up Wikipedia: In information technology, big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database

Wrote an EDN format reader and writer in Python

I was reading about the EDN format over the weekend. EDN (pronounced like in “eden garden”) is a data format in the same league as JSON but is supposed to have some nifty features such as sets, keywords, date-time type, custom types, and also being a proper subset of Clojure.

Created an app for live preview of Pandoc

When my wife was editing my books, she used Mou.app for live preview of the text so that she knows what the output is going to be like. The caveat was that Mou.app does plain Markdown and not Pandoc format which would mean the preview would be screwed

Delhi By Cycle

I had an interesting morning today cycling around Old Delhi guided by Arkash of Delhi by Cycle tour. Seeing a city by cycle was a great incentive by itself and was fun. But I ended up with a case of the Paris Shock Syndrome because of the state of filth

Taj Mahal

No matter how many times I have heard about Taj Mahal, it’s startling how big it really is. It’s amazing that it is built on top of water wells and special wood because the wet wood makes it resistant to vibrations and hence earthquake-resistant. Of course, Shah Jahan

Flying Fox in Jodhpur

After our previous flying fox / zipline experience, we were looking forward to the 6-zipline Flying Fox experience in the Mehrangarh Fort at Jodhpur and we were not disappointed, it was a picturesque location and the exciting ziplines went over water, fort walls and across the blue city scenery, ranging from

Camel Safari in Thar Desert

We had an interesting camel ride and fantastic night in the Thar Desert, thanks to Trotters, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.

Nostalgia in a startup vs. Anu Aunty book

In a long bus ride, I read How I braved Anu Aunty and made a million-dollar company and I loved the book. The stories in the book are especially familiar to those who have faced the ire of family and sometimes friends at wanting to do a startup. In the

What I learned in gamification class

For 2-3 weeks after Prof. Kevin Werbach’s Gamification course ended, I literally felt my weekends were dull without listening to him! And I’m not the only course attendee who felt that way. The best part about the course for me was how engaging and interesting the topics were

Review of Cal Newport’s So Good book

Last weekend, I read Cal Newport’s latest book – “So Good They Can’t Ignore  You” and was very happy that I read it – it was just the sort of book that helps a person who is a few years into his/her career and is beginning to question many

Exploratory Cycling

I recently got my cycle fixed up at Rider Owned Bikes (ironically, despite the grumpy owner of that shop). I hadn’t done that good a job at reassembling the bike gears after I had taken apart the wheels and put them all in the back-seat of the car when

Doing the Flying-Fox at Vihi-Kasara

I came to know there was a water rappelling event organized by VRangers this weekend via the Mumbai Hikers blog. We booked it and only realized later that it was 220+ km away and we’ll have to be there by 10am. Ouch. We inquired for stays in Igatpuri so

Learning Gamification by attending a MOOC

I remember when @Ravi_Mohan kept talking about MOOCs and how excited he is by it, I didn’t pay attention to it at the time. A few weeks ago, I watched Daphne Koller’s TED talk and was blown away. I ended up signing up for one of the

Holiday at The Machan

My wife and myself recently had a great time at The Machan in Lonavala, Maharashtra, India. It’s perfect for nature lovers who want a weekend (or in our case, weekday) getaway and be amidst greenery and silence. It is certainly not the place if you’re looking for “activities

Life without a TV

During our stay in Pune, in the first apartment we stayed, the owner had provided a TV. We had to soon move out because the apartment was in the topmost floor which translated to unbearable heat in the summer. In the second (and current) apartment, the owner did not provide

Book review: Thoughts from Jaya, a retelling of Mahabharata

The world around me is very unsettling. First, we have the incompetence of the governments of the day, and then the startling realities highlighted by Satyamev Jayate show, even if it is not the whole truth, and so on. And these strange behavior of man to hurt and not help

Learning Clojure

I once happened to attend a RubyConfIndia talk by C42’s Steven Deobald who said: data > functions > macros > compilers That kind of stuck in my head even though I didn’t know what it meant at that time. I understood it only after learning Clojure and “The Clojure / Lisp way”

Paragliding in Kamshet

The Sunday before last, we went paragliding in a beautiful place called Pawananagar Dam, near Kamshet in Maharashtra: The idea was to go on “tandem flights” where a qualified instructor will take you as a passenger in one of these parachute gliders: When I experienced my turn, I realized that

Freewriting – Review of the Accidental Genius book

Semi-regularly, I’ve been doing something I called “Paper Therapy.” The idea was simple: “Write on paper till your brain has nothing left in it.” This stupidly simple idea has often been miraculous in helping me clear my mind and think of ideas or options that I was unable to

Book Review : Focus Manifesto

I was struggling with focus in the past week, and I needed a refresher of the basics. So I was looking for reading a new book that I haven’t read before, and luckily there was a free one – the Focus Manifesto by Leo Babauta of ZenHabits.com fame. The

Two nuggets from Coders at Work book

I’ve been reading Coders at Work on and off, and it is a good read for coders who want to learn how coders, who they admire, think and approach programming. Two favorite nuggets of mine so far are from JWZ and Brad Fitzpatrick who are definitely two of my

Book Review : Start-up Nation (story of Israel)

I read the "Start-up Nation" book last week. This book was so engrossing that I read it within 2 days, keeping aside everything else. After reading this book, I started seeing the patterns about Israel being high tech hotspot, for example consider just two pieces of news in the last

Inspired by companies incubated at RTBI, IIT Madras

I am here at IITM, Chennai to help out NextDrop in some technology discussions, and have been blown away by the kinds of companies incubated at the Rural Technology Business Incubation facility (RTBI). For example, consider Stellapps which is developing an automated cow milking system! To get a taste of

Freelancing for NextDrop

SMS and interactive voice response systems are emerging as a significant methodology for gathering and spreading information in the developing countries. This is important to note because in 2010, more than 4 billion people paid for mobile phone service. That’€™s 6 of every 10 people on the planet compared

Freelancing for Joshua Schachter

The first person I started freelancing for is Joshua Schachter. Joshua is well known as the founder of del.icio.us, the bookmarking website which made “social filtering”, “tagging” (at the same time as Flickr) and “Web 2.0” common buzzwords. I stumbled upon his tweet one day that he

Working out of Goa

I finally got to check one particular item out of my bucket list – working out of Goa. This was possible purely because of freelancing which means I can be anywhere as long as I’m getting the work done. When my wife and myself were planning this month-long road trip

Gokarna to Goa by car

Started the day (23-Sep-2011) with a visit to the famous Shiva temple at Gokarna. Good start to my birthday. Today’s journey started off with good roads. Me like. From Gokarna, we headed towards Karwar where we had breakfast, and stopped by the lovely empty Karwar beach: And passed over

Mulki to Gokarna by car

After the mrs. got surfing lessons in Mulki, we left early morning on 22-Sep-2011 from Mulki. Immediately, the roads started getting bad. Every few metres, there were potholes and big ones too. We stopped to have breakfast at Udupi. And after some distance, we suddenly revved into the road next

Surfing in Mulki

We are staying at the Hare Krishna Ashram a.k.a. Ashram Surf Retreat for the past 2 days (20-Sep-2011 to 21-Sep-2011). The wife wanted to learn surfing. It’s amazing how much surfing is picking up in India especially with a lot of surfing, including competitions, happening in Mahabalipuram.

Mysore to Mulki by car

After KTM, the next day (19-Sep-2011) we did a road trip from Mysore to Mulki (SH7 and NH48). We started the day with a visit to the auspicious Ranganath Swamy Temple at Srirangapattana and headed out via Pandavapura → Krishnarajpet → Channarayapattana → Hassan → Sakleshpur. We had lunch at Sakleshpur, which is a

Kaveri Trail Marathon 2011

I did a half marathon (21 km of running) at Kaveri Trail Marathon again this year. I trained with Runners High again this year, and without them, I wouldn’t even have been able to focus on the run. Work has kept me so busy that I would’ve easily

Freelancing

I’ve been a long-time reader of Ramit Sethi – I love his irreverent approach to money which has influenced me positively. About a year and a half ago, he launched the Earn1K program and I was immediately curious about it. Having failed to run a business once, I thought this

Ran a half-marathon in Dharwad

According to the Runners High program for this week, I was supposed to run 21km this Saturday. But I’m in Dharwad for various reasons, so decided to run that today. As I like to say, “You’ve not really explored a city until you’ve run in it.” And

Alleppey and a question on how to travel

Every time I go travelling within India, I have noticed that the foreigners always seem to find the best spots – whether it is hidden beaches in Goa or amazing lake-side guest houses as I noticed in a recent getaway to a houseboat in Alleppey, Kerala. “How do they do that?

Leaving Infibeam

Today is my last day at Infibeam. I’m going to miss working in this environment because I learned a lot about ecommerce and online buying in India. For example, I was surprised to know how much sales go up during Diwali (in hindsight, not so surprising, of course) and

Talk on Productivity at Barcamp Bangalore 10

At Barcamp Bangalore 10 on Saturday, I talked about GTD, Pomodoro and Productivity: NOTE: If you have trouble viewing the web version, there is also a PDF version of my slides. I was nervous when preparing for this talk because it is not a concrete topic, it’s something abstract

Statistics to wow non-techies about digital future

A common question I get from non-techies is “Is ecommerce for real? Do people really buy online?” My line of argument is that the future is digital, and hence buying online is a natural consequence of that. However, just saying that was not convincing enough. So I gathered some statistics

Passionate Programmer book review

Every once in a while I get an email like this: Sir, I am a beginner to python and programming. I started with the C++ and found it hard so one day via google I found your perfect tutorial “A byte of Python”. I read the whole tutorial in one

Married

As a general rule of thumb, I do not write about friends or family on this blog so as to keep my professional life and personal life separate. But exceptions are to be made for exceptional people. One such exceptional person is my life partner – Sharvari. We got married a

Everyday reminder about Impact

Everyday I get emails from readers of my books that makes me wonder: Am I continuing to make an impact everyday? Can I have the same impact again through my work? Maybe, let’s see. But still, it’s difficult to top this: I’m a 16-year-old boy from Guangxi,

PESIT Alumni Newsletter Guest Editorial

I was recently asked to write memoirs of my college life for a guest editorial for my alma mater’s alumni newsletter, and I jotted down a few thoughts while reminiscing the past. Long-time readers may not find these stories new. For the others, I have hyperlinked the related old

Programming Language Adoption

55 people have asked me to write about: Indian companies just don’t take Python seriously, not as much as Perl. Why is that? 28 people have asked me to write about: Most companies opting for Ruby as their programming language of choice instead of Python 51 people have asked

Book Review : Pomodoro Technique Illustrated

1. Have a list of things to do. 2. Pick one thing to work on. Start clock. 3. When tired, stop clock. Take a break. It worked because of two reasons: 1. Observing yourself led to the Hawthorne Effect 2. Time spent per day was a quantifiable measure of productivity.

Cyber Celebrity?

Deccan Chronicle article says: In the blogosphere, technology rules supreme as some of the most popular bloggers, Prashanth HN (techbangalore.com), Swaroop C H (swaroopch.com) and Vikas S N (techknots.com) all blog about it.

isbn.net.in open-sourced

I have been getting many emails regarding isbn.net.in since I put it out 9 months ago. For example: Hi Swaroop, I am following your blog for last year. I have visited and used ur isbn.net.in service. It is a good idea. To easy of mobile phone

My Bash and Vim setups

I find it surprising on how little time coders spend on their development environment (the “dev env”). And especially, I find it amusing that I can find, refactor and test code way faster than the Netbeans IDE users in my office, with just a shell and Vim setup. So why

The real reasons why Indian startups struggle to hire

The last article on difficulty of hiring for startups in India generated a lot of discussion (also see the HackerStreet.India discussion about this article). I was surprised to see so much response within 24 hours. I guess it shows how much of a pain point it actually is: Ramjee

Why is no one talking about the difficulty of hiring for startups in India?

We’ve all heard about how startups are key to the future economy of India and we’ve heard about how hiring should be a top priority for any company – then why is it that hiring is NOT a majorly discussed issue in startup events in India? I ask this

Kaveri Trail Marathon 2010

The Goal I ran the Kaveri Trail Marathon two Sundays ago (Sep 19, 2010). It was a marathon worth remembering – the preparation, the anticipation, the great set of friends I made, the beautiful trail that we ran in, and the D-day performance. My personal target was to finish 21KM under

Featured Blogger in Outlook Magazine

This blog has been featured by Outlook Magazine as one of the “8 Bloggers to Follow and Bookmark” in the B-Drive / Best B-Schools Snippets section of their Sep 27, 2010 issue (cached PDF here). It is indeed an honour to be featured along with TechCrunch, Rajesh Jain, Amit Agarwal and

Book Review: The Checklist Manifesto

I recently read the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande – a respected surgeon, noted author, MacArthur fellow, New Yorker staff writer, and a professor at Harvard Medical School. The premise of the entire book is the author’s dive into the concept of a checklist and how they have

Yelagiri Hills

A couple of weeks ago, we went to Yelagiri Hills (in Tamil Nadu) on a one day road trip. It’s a great little hill station which has not yet been commercialized (relatively speaking) and has a neat trekking trail. If you’re looking for something fun to do on

Marathons in India in 2010 H2

I’ve seen so many people in the recent months who have expressed interest in running, but never start. Forget what shoes to buy, forget what fancy GPS devices you want to buy, forget about monitoring your heart rate, forget about tracking sites. You don’t need those to START

In praise of Raghu Dixit

Last night, I was privileged to attend another performance by Raghu Dixit at B-Flat. This would be the fifth time I am watching Raghu Dixit live – first was at Opus, second at a Nokia concert, third at foss.in, fourth at a TiE mixer, and fifth at B-flat yesterday. More

Creativity x Organization = Impact

81 people have asked me about “Innovation – ways to make people innovate.” That’s a hard question. Especially because I’m always wary of using such an ambiguous term. And more so, when there are far more qualified people to answer out there. Since I have been asked the question,

PESIT Offer to Startups: Mentor Students, Get Office Space

My alma mater, PESIT (in Bangalore), has an interesting proposition for startups – mentor students and get office space in return. The background is that they are working to improve the quality of education in the IS / CS departments. One of the ideas they identified was to work with in-industry programmers

About Deep Procrastination

Cal Newport, one of my favorite bloggers ever, wrote about the upside of deep procrastination last week. I had a few thoughts on the subject. So what is deep procrastination? You know you’re in it when “No matter how dire the stakes, starting work becomes an insurmountable prospect.” I

isbn.net.in updates

A while back, I released a side-project called http://isbn.net.in – a simple tool for comparing book prices in India. I received lots of feedback, suggestions and praise. I have updated it with fixes for the bugs reported and implemented most of the suggestions. It was interesting to see

The Total Kannada Store

I had the privilege of visiting the Total Kannada Store in Jayanagar today. What is amazing is that it is an entire store dedicated to only Kannada entertainment – whether it is movie CDs, CDs of plays, CDs of comedy series, magazines, books, classic literature and even T-shirts! The truth is

An experiment to be Google-Free

Update on 5 Oct, 2012 : Still on Mac applications, but now using the free email mailbox option of my domain registrar Gandi.net + local Thunderbird email folders instead of Rackspace Email. Desktop apps are better for frequently used stuff. No matter how many times web apps lure me into “available

How to get funding from Government of India

I will be speaking in a panel at the HeadStart Conference, Hyderabad today regarding what is the funding that was granted by the Govt. of India to my ex-startup, and how you can apply. I converted the content I had prepared into for-web-only slides for your perusal:

isbn.net.in – One Place to find the best online price for a book in India

I had an itch – I wished there was a simple way of deciding whether to buy a book and where to buy a book. So I created http://isbn.net.in The initial idea I had was to make a bookmarklet that will do everything – it will figure out the

A founder has to do only two things right

I’ve been pondering over the myriad of startups and ideas that have been in the fore recently (in my twitter stream). I have a new theory that has been developing in my mind for quite a while: A founder has to do only two things right: invention and marketing.

Taste and Ambition

A question to all wannabes, startuppers and entrepreneurs: Does taste drive ambition or ambition drive taste for you? In other words, Do you have a passion for Ferrari and hence want to become rich, or do you want to become rich and then perhaps buy something like a Ferrari? [1]

Running 10K at Auroville

It had been a really long time since my last run, nearly 8 months ago. I was out of shape. So, we decided to register for the 10K at Auroville Marathon as an incentive to get back to running shape, and, boy,  did it work. In the last one month,

The point of being Done

Listening to Seth Godin say “What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship” reminded me of the The Cult of Done manifesto: If you find the image inconvenient to read, here’s the text: 1. There are three states of being. Not knowing,

Joining InfiBeam

Update: As of 22 June, 2011, I’m no longer with Infibeam. Thanking the community First and foremost, thanks to all who encouraged me, and offered support and help when I wrote about leaving my own company. Many people, without any personal benefit in mind, connected me to very interesting

Fun can change behavior

Once in a while I come across something really inspiring, and this time it was The fun theory – a “thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better.” Getting people to use the staircase than the escalator Getting people to

Musings on 2009

– Work – Resolutions Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans. I got sidetracked by struggling to make a business. But don’t regret it for even a moment. Learned a lot about the real world. Changed from being a meek guy who liked to hide behind

The 5-year limit to being a coder in India?

Let me start with a story I had heard about long ago when I was at Adobe. There was this guy who had come in for interviews for a technical role. He passed all the tech interviews with flying colors, the team liked his personality and felt he would fit

The magic of foss.in

Why do I keep going back to foss.in? Because I’m the kind of person who needs extrinsic motivation. That’s why having a good circle of friends with a positive attitude is so important to me. And that’s why the foss.in community is so important to

Coding Problems for Homework

“Coding Homework” is a small website that I have built to list small problems that one can work on, to learn how to use a new programming language. For example, small problems requiring to read from a file, or to use regular expressions, how to find duplicate files in a

Leaving IonLab

Yesterday was my last day at IonLab, the company that I built with a few friends. It has been a wild ride but I could continue no longer. I am leaving due to internal differences on the progress and transparency in the company. We have been well-supported in our experience,

An interactive version of A Byte of Python

Roorky is a new startup that has created a new file format and software for interactive books. As part of the default installation of the software, they are bundling A Byte of Python free with the software. What is interesting is that this may help complete beginners who stumble in

What I learned at NASSCOM Product Conclave 2009

1. There are not enough good problems that tech startups are working on and there seems to be no shortage of funds, platforms and ecosystem partners willing to help startups. The ecosystem is hungry for successes. 2. Product Management skills are the need of the hour, NOT talks about talks

To get somewhere, you already have to be there

The irony in this world is that “To get somewhere, you already have to be there.” From an individual perspective: * If you want to make money, you need to already have money. * To get a job, you need to be one-year experienced and not a fresher. * If you’re experienced

Mobile App market in India

Thinking from an entrepreneurial angle, it seems to me that there is almost no mobile app market in India today i.e., it is not a startuppable market. All the successful apps that are making money are transaction-based. For example, ngpay takes a cut from every movie ticket you buy

Thought for the Day

The world is no place for a logical/rational person. — Swaroop C H Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe. — Albert Einstein A fool may be known by six things: anger, without cause; speech, without profit; change, without progress;

Wish for browsers : Adopt MHTML format

This is a request to the communities behind all the open source browsers: Please adopt the MHTML format (or even better, the Mozilla Archive Format) and make it a native part of the browsers. Use cases 1. Every time a user wants to send across content that doesn’t fit

Core Needs

“People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for

Writing Principles

I think of this weblog as a small place for me to write. The reason I write is because I have this innate implicit belief that I learn only by teaching. In hindsight, that’s why I wrote those books and that’s why I keep writing in this space.

iPhone for productivity

I was reading the The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars and did not find it useful, because it was mostly about games or things that apply to people only in USA. So I was wondering if I had my own list. Stanza My most favorite application is

Twitter vs. Why we can't concentrate?

Attention Span I started using Twitter as an experiment, and it was the first and only social network I really participated in. It was great because I actually made new friends that I went on trips with, got the opportunity to follow the thoughts of interesting people, and whenever I

10 things I wish I was serious about before starting a startup

1. Everything gets magnified. Whether it is minor differences or personal shortcomings or the multitasking required. What you think of as a small weakness, will become your biggest weakness. What you think of as a small strength, will be a very big strength. 2. It is an emotional rollercoaster ride.

Thought for the Day

Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You,

To Masters or not?

39 people have asked me “The case for master degrees. Should or Shouldn’t ?” This article is for those 39 people. Well, the correct answer almost always is “It depends.” But let me give a few points to think about. Obviously, I’m answering from the perspective of CompSci students.

Why I do Time Tracking

The Idea A couple of months ago, I was going through a “productivity drought.” I used to repeatedly bounce between tasks. I couldn’t concentrate enough. Work was suffering. I thought to myself “Just how bad is the situation? Can I quantify it?” Then I started using a very old

My Benchmark for Entrepreneurship

Here is a guy who sells dosas and rice items in his push cart every evening. I didn’t realize that he was my entrepreneurial benchmark until my friend explained it to me: * He has at least 100 customers everyday because he is there for 4-5 hours every evening, and

Duathlon and Murakami

Last weekend, I participated in the BSA Hercules Duathlon organized by RFL. I did the 10 km running + 20 km cycling thing. I was the last-but-one guy to finish and I did take twice the amount of time as the first guy to finish. But I didn’t care about

A few statistics about India

From President’s speech in 2007: * “Today, the average age of India’s population is below 25 years. Approximately, 77 crore of our people, or about 70 percent of the population, fall below the age of 35.” From Tracking The Growth of India’s Middle Class: * “Over the next 20

One device or many?

Question: Will the future consist of people carrying a single device or multiple gadgets? Arguments for one device Students use it for everything. After reading this New York Times article on how mobile phones are used in South Korea, I’m astounded about the possibilities. Students are using their mobile

No book on Emacs

I’ve had a Skribit suggestion for my blog, with seven votes on it, that asks: Can you write a Byte Of Emacs? First of all, I’m flattered that 7 people out there like A Byte of Vim so much that they are asking about a similar book for

Has your company chosen its vector of innovation?

I have a guest post up at StartupDunia. Please do read and chip in your thoughts and comments.

How to build an online community?

Every now and then, I try to build a group of people to talk about specific topics but it quickly dies because of inactivity. Although I really saw the value in having such a community, I just didn’t know how to build one. Even if one person keeps pumping

Coming soon… TrackEveryCoin, a personal finance system

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. Amazon conducted a poll just before the start of the year 2009 asking people on what are their New Year Resolutions. The top two resolutions were (1) Lose Weight and (2) Get Your Finances in Order. What is

Ideas are Cheap : IMDB of Music, Books?

What is it that I like about IMDB? * Shows me what are the movies that are popular in theatres right now * Shows what new movies are releasing this week * The first item on every movie page is the average user rating * It links to every individual artiste involved (actor, director,

A new kind of wiki

Interview with CocoaCast

I was recently interviewed by CocoaCast (mp3) to talk about Python for their Mac developer community, as part of their “Unbound Developers” podcast series. I was apprehensive about doing this because I’ve never been live-interviewed before, but in the spirit of doing new things, I went ahead and it

The difference between fun and work

Reading a book is fun. If you have to do a review on the book for the newspaper by Friday, it becomes work. Writing code is fun. If you have a deadline next week, it becomes work. Spending time with that special someone is fun. After tying the knot and

Chunking

Here is a typical day of someone who sent this to Caterina Fake: This style of working is explained further in “Don’t Multi-task When You Can Use Chunking”. What does your day look like?

The new ION packaging

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. Today is the second birthday of our ION USB Charger and we are happy to announce that it is now available in a new and improved packaging! We needed some improvements to our packaging because: 1. Our previous

Vote for the Candidate

I attended a Bangalore South Lok Sabha Candidates’ debate yesterday, this time held at NMKRV Jayanagar and organized by the Rotary Clubs of South Bangalore. Only Capt. Gopinath (Independent) had arrived on time. Ananth Kumar (BJP) arrived a bit late but immediately greeted each and every individual in the hall

I hate tabs

I hate tabs, and I like windows. Why? Switching between windows is Alt+Tab. Simple. Switching between tabs is irritating because it is a contrasting situation: 1. The keyboard shortcut is not a standard, every application does it in its own way. It could be Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn or it

What is your ideal personal finance life?

I have been reading personal finance-related blogs for a while now. But due to obvious reasons, it had become very important to have proper habits so that I have a healthy personal finance, and hence I started doing more research on it. But what is personal finance? I like how

One year since I had a salary

It has been exactly one year since I quit my last job. The good Things that I thought was important but didn’t turn out to be: It has been one year since: * I had to do something because I had no choice. * I had a boss. * I had to

Idli, Orchid and Will Power

I just finished reading “Idli, Orchid and Will Power”, the autobiography of Vithal Venkatesh Kamat. Just a few days back, a friend was telling me that the famous Utility building Kamat restaurant in Bangalore no longer has quality food and hence no longer a popular place. I read this book

Mindmaps

Ever since I read about how Arif Vakil uses a “My World Mindmap” to organize his life, I started using mind maps. It is such an utterly simple concept but yet I still find it fascinating. If you don’t know what a mind map is, think of it as

From Google Reader to MyAlltop

About six months ago, I had stopped reading all RSS feeds because I wasn’t managing my information input well. Over the past few months I was slowly creeping back into the same RSS habit and I didn’t like it. The biggest problem for me was seeing that unread

What's in a name, indeed?

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. Vikram has written an interesting post on whether the name of a brand matters which got me thinking. I don’t think it’s that simple. I believe that Company name doesn’t matter. Product name matters. This

Thought for the Day

I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from

Where to find startup jobs in India?

If you want to find out what jobs are available in startups in India, then there are myriad resources to check: * VentureWoods * Pluggd.in ‘coffee’ forum * Pluggd.in ecosystem section * Hello Intern * Sutra Jobs * Indian Jobs board at ‘Joel On Software’ * Barcamp Mumbai Startup Jobs section * NEN Startup Jobs section

Barcamp Bangalore 8

I had a great time at BCB8. Even though I had ranted previously on the tech focus this time, the planners made it clear that all topics are welcome and Barcampers kept the same familiar atmosphere going. To be honest, I don’t go to Barcamp for the sessions per

Why Vista (Still) Sucks

Warning: The following is a rant. Please feel free to skip if not interested. What I was trying to do: I had only Ubuntu Linux installed on my laptop, no dual-boot with Windows. The DVD drive stopped working, so I contacted Dell support. They asked me to upgrade the drivers,

Mobile phone is half the PC

Prof. Sadagopan has an interesting take on how the mobile phone is evolving and how he views its relationship with the PC: In the GSMA World Congress in Barcelona during Feb 16-19, 2009, Acer (the laptop manufacturer) launched four (mobile) handsets under the brand name “Tempo” Last week Nokia talked

Tadiyandamol Again

Eleven of us went trekking to Tadiyandamol. We ended up trekking more than 25 km on day 1, literally walking in the clouds, pitching our own tents, and braving the winds during the night. All in all, a beautiful place, awesome company and a memorable sunrise made it a great

Let's talk about future of webapp development at BCB8

I quickly (read as “hastily”) put together this short presentation for a discussion session at the upcoming Barcamp. The question is “With the advent of cloud computing, cloud databases, RIAs, APIs, etc., are web developers and their frameworks evolving and keeping up with the times?” Are WebDevs and their Frameworks

Ideas are Cheap : Kannada Word Lists

Continuing the “Ideas are Cheap” series, here’s another simple idea that I would personally find very useful but would be difficult to execute in terms of content. These days I’m finding it hard to read Kannada newspapers because my vocabulary is clearly lacking, and consequently I would probably

What's your vision for Bengaluru?

The ABIDe, i.e. Agenda for Bengaluru Infrastructure and Development Task Force (setup by the current government) is working on a roadmap for development of Bengaluru along with deadlines and regular 100-day monitoring, etc. The comprehensive reports are available in PDF format on a public website with even discussion forums

Why Stack Overflow is useful

In one of my previous thoughts, I had mentioned about a website called “Stack Overflow” in passing. I’m surprised that many people do not know or use this resource and community. Just a brief search over there would answer so many questions that programmers have. For example, there is

Get into the Flow

A big question that keeps coming up for an attention-deficit person like me is “How do you get into the flow?” There are two things that work for me and I find them at loggerheads against each other. The problem is that it has been difficult to stick to either

Product for the future

My favorite session at proto.in 5th edition was by Atul Chitnis who reinforced the basics of business. He made one remark which seems obvious but something that we don’t put in practice: “Today is history. Build for the future so that your product can be ready just in

Water Sports in Sharavathy Valley

Last weekend, I was back in Sharavathy Valley in Shimoga, but this time for some water sports. Here’s a photo essay of the trip: When we were reaching our camp area, the entrance itself was impressive, and I was excited by such clear blue water. We had Breakfast and

Outliers : What leads to Success

I read Outliers, The STORY of SUCCESS by Malcolm Gladwell last week and found it fascinating. Here’s an excerpt: Cultural legacies *matter*, and once we’ve seen the surprising effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a

Refocus on the Basics

Most of what I learned about programming was during my first year at Yahoo!. I wrote so much Perl code and dove into naive attempts at distributed computing, and the like. I was pretty proud of my code and that I put in hard work, and was vindicated when I

Why use Creative Commons license?

Many people have asked me on why I released my Vim book under a Creative Commons license instead of getting it published. (1) First of all, I did try to talk to publishers, hoping that I would convince them to release the book simultaneously under a free license as well

It is not obvious how to make money online

Execution is one aspect of making an idea successful, I would say the other is having a business model. And the latter is very hard as well. Why? Because it is not obvious how to make money online, especially in India. The obvious way would be to have freemium models

"My Online Life" in Mint

A list of blogs I read has been published in the Mint Lounge newspaper on 13-Dec-2008 Saturday. Read it online on the Mint website or in the epaper section. Thanks to Sidin for asking me to write this and publishing it in Mint. Unfortunately, as typical of newspapers, my words

How Fresh Graduates Can Grow

As a small experiment, I had put up a skribit sidebar where anybody can suggest what I can write about. Little did I know that it would actually be used seriously. Someone posted the topic “On how fresh graduates can learn independently and grow. Instead of waiting for the Company

What product creation should be about

I just finished reading “Subject To Change: creating great products and services for an uncertain world”. This book is written by Adaptive Path, the same guys who invented the words “blog” and “ajax”, as well as creators of the Aurora browser concept. It has been a revelatory book for me,

Great response to 'A Byte of Vim'

It has been three days since I released my Vim book. I’m very happy with the response. For starters, there has been 5003 PDF downloads, 14,715 unique visitors and 35,129 page views. That’s in just three days! Second, I’m glad to see the kind of

Announcing my free book on Vim

Today is the first day of foss.in/2008, and on this occasion, I’m happy to announce the first public release of my Creative-Commons licensed book on the Vim 7 editor. This book is meant for both beginners and advanced users. For beginners, it walks you through the first

Bangalore Ultra Marathon 2008

Sunday was the day of the second Bangalore Ultra Marathon. Had to get up at 3AM in order to reach Cubbon Park at 4:30AM for the buses to take us to ‘Our Native Village’ resort in Hesaraghatta. We reached early at 6AM and were waiting for the day to

ROAM – Just the bike. The rider. And a place to ride.

Tonight was Movie Night at Bums On The Saddle and the movie was ROAM. This is one of the movies that can get anyone excited about cycling, and in this case, mountain biking. I couldn’t decide whether to concentrate on the adrenaline-rushing jumps and stunts or the amazing locations

Thought for the Day

Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But

Ideas are Cheap: Touch screen device with a browser

Use case Mom asked me to find out the name of the God in the temple at Gokarna. I just had to visit Wikipedia and find out. She could have done this herself but she’s too intimidated by the PC. The same goes for checking movie listings. And so

Internet usage in India

Every startup needs to do some market research while working on their next big idea. And part of this market research is looking at demographic and economic data to find out the size of your target audience. For most of those who are reading this, the audience probably is people

Mullainagiri, third time lucky as well

This weekend, we climbed Mullainagiri and Bababudanagiri. Even though this is my third visit, it never fails to delight me on its beauty. Mullainagiri and Tadiyandamol are my favorite trekking spots in terms of scenery. In the 3-4 days before the trek, we didn’t spend enough time on the

Common activities means better friends

If you want to make new friends, there is no use in just saying hi to people, something of value should be exchanged or there should be a common activity. That’s when they become friends. Real friends. I’ve added a page on my wiki to list the type

Are electric scooters viable?

I finally had to give away my old Suzuki Samurai bike. It was a 1999 model, which makes it 9 years old. I used to call it ‘The Last Samurai’ because it is one of the few Samurai bikes that I could see on the roads. Sigh. It feels like

Politicians should have a retirement age

If there’s one thing that I wish could change in India, I would vote for having a retirement age for politicians. When there is a concept of retirement for many other careers like engineers, bankers, CEOs, etc. why shouldn’t the same apply for politicians? If the reason for

A principled life according to Steve Pavlina

Ever since college days where I got hooked onto the Internet, I have been an avid reader of self-improvement websites and books. I used to prowl for content, before the advent of lifehacking and productivity websites. I eventually stumbled upon good websites like 43Folders.com, and my friend Pradeep cajoled

What we do at IONLAB

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. When I meet people and have a conversation, they eventually ask the question “So, what do you guys do?” I like to say “We make stuff” but that’s hardly understandable. The best example I like to give

A Byte of Python in hard copy

If you’re the kind of person who prefers to read a physical book vs. online books, then you’ll be happy to know that the A Byte of Python book is now available as a printed hard copy. The best part is that the hard-working translators can also publish

Ideas are Cheap : Better email

I was just browsing through this paper on “Generating summary keywords for emails using topics” and was fascinated by its usefulness, especially because it “selects words that describe each message in the context of existing topics rather than simply selecting keywords based on a single message in isolation.” Imagine if

Cycling To Work at Barcamp Bangalore 7

The weekend before last, BarCamp Bangalore 7 was held. The session that I was most looking forward to was the ‘cycling to work’ session initiated by Pradeep B V (of MapUnity fame). What made the session interesting was that people were asked to cycle to IIMB and showcase their bicycles

IONLAB – The Next Experiment

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. It’s been nearly 5 months since I last quit my job. Five months. Wow. It’s weird because it doesn’t feel that long. I spent most of the first few months whiling away, and I thoroughly

How to make a website

When making a website, there are simply so many aspects to consider. I’ve been gathering some useful links and information on the same, right from How to Evaluate a new Product Idea to choosing color schemes. I’ve put all of these links together into a Website Making Howto

Personal Wiki

There have been two recent changes on my website – the redesigned theme and the book-as-a-wiki. They are related developments. The reason I needed a new theme for my website was because I wanted a blog and a wiki integrated into the same website with a seamless theme. If you visit

Book updated for Python 3.0

After a gap of 3.5 years, I’ve finally updated the ‘A Byte of Python’ book. The interesting news is that it is updated for the upcoming Python 3.0 language making it probably the first book to be released for Python 3.0. The book is now a

Ideas are Cheap : Real Coding Training

This is a continuation of the Ideas are Cheap series. We all know how much disparity there is between computer science courses in engineering colleges in India and real-world coding skills. So how about a training institute that fills this gap? I’m sure the first question is that how

Cycling on Kanakapura Road

This Sunday morning, Varun and myself started cycling down Kanakapura Road. The direction from Bangalore towards Thalagattapura was generally downhill and we started to enjoy the cycling when we saw good green fields on either side and surprisingly, lessening traffic. It’s always fun for me to cycle to the

How attractive is your website?

I was trying to analyze the feedback on my website’s new design. There seems to be a trend that relates their usage of the website with their feedback. While researching on this subject, I found a paper by three people affiliated with the University of Manchester, UK. The paper

New Theme

I’m such a sucker for good design. After a couple of years of the nice pop colored theme, I decided to get a new theme, this time by the talented Divya Manian a.k.a. “NimbuPani”. The main characteristics I was looking for was that the theme should be

Specialization vs Generalization

I’ve been pondering about specialization vs. generalization in terms of career skills. I have this notion that I should be a maven, should be an expert at something. But yet, I mostly do things that are the very opposite of this idea. Since I don’t tend to be

Social networks of yore

I wonder why people consider “social networks” to be a “new thing”. It’s the “rage these days”, they say. Actually, they’ve been around for a while but in a different disguise. Take the case of the Erdos number: In order to be assigned an Erdos number, an author

Indian Innovations for the Energy Challenge

After reading Atanu Dey on India’s Energy Challenge and Vijay Anand on Why the N-Deal is important, I was wondering if there were some interesting things being done in India regarding energy. And sure enough, I came across these: * Water * Balakrishna has created a turbine to generate power from

proto.in Edition 4 at Delhi

I attended the proto.in 4 conference last week (held at the beautiful IIT Delhi campus) and had a very productive and thought-provoking time. Day 1 was the fastrack “startup school” sessions. The keynote session was Kiran Karnik, ex-President of NASSCOM, who pointed out that this “recession” is not a

Ideas are Cheap – Build your mobile

It’s that time of the year when proto.in fever spreads. And the ideaworm has got to me. Inspired by Vijay Anand’s “Ideas To Toss” series, I thought why not start my own occasional series as well? I’m calling it the “Ideas are Cheap” series. The name

Tips for Working From Home

Working from home full-time is a different experience than we are used to. You make or break things, there’s no one asking about your progress and there are no deadlines. It’s all up to you. My productivity has varied a lot during this time and I was wondering

The meaning of Touch

While I was cycling today, I had an interesting thought. I always have my ol’ iPod Nano with me while I’m cycling. As usual, if I want to listen to a song again, I click the left button to repeat, if I don’t like a song, I click

Trekking in Kodachadri

This weekend, one of my long-pending wishes came true: I finally trekked Kodachadri. Kodachadri is a mountain in the Western Ghats, in Karnataka. It is a famous trekking spot. On Saturday morning, we reached Nittur, grabbed some breakfast and then proceeded towards Kumble, the starting point of the trek. Right

To live unconventionally

Imagine a conversation with your doctor that goes like this: “What do you do for work?” the doctor asked me at the beginning of the interview. “Well, I’m trying to start my own social movement.” (There was a long pause, but he didn’t ask anything else about that.

Super Crunchers

Today, I re-read a book called Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted by Ian Ayres. So what is supercrunching? Now something is changing. Business and government professionals are relying more and more on databases to guide their decisions. The story of hedge funds is really the story of a

The Need to Fight

Long ago, a wise friend I used to know once told me that humans have many kinds of needs – physiological, emotional, etc. Along with these, there is also the need to fight. I’ve been thinking over and over on how true this is. Or whether it is just baloney.

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:

Launch of ion2

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. Last week, we quietly relaunched ion, our USB charger. The very next day, we shipped ions to customers in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai. And an hour ago, I shipped one to Bhubaneswar. It’s good to be

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

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](http://www.orkut.

Cut down that movie

How would life be if you could tell your computer to cut down a 3-hour movie to one hour? Sounds impossible? From what I understand of this paper called “Feature fusion and redundancy pruning for rush video summarization” by the people at the Vision Research Laboratory at UCSB, it is

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

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

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

Always remember Carpe Diem

One of the hard lessons that I have learned this year is “Always remember Carpe Diem“. The corollary is that “If you don’t execute on your idea quick, someone else definitely will.” For example, long back Vikram had this idea that there should be a company which takes care

How to handle information overload

Philipp Lenssen recently had a good post on tips on information overload by various people. It got me thinking about the various tips and tricks I’ve imbibed in the recent past and which work reasonably well for me. So I tried to collate them into one place: Email * Always

Career Advice

There have been many times where I’ve been asked for “career advice”, especially after a talk. I usually suggest them to ‘build a repertoire of things you have done, things you are capable of, things you like to do’. But I’ve never really been sure of this advice

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,

Why television and movies are captivating

From Philip K. Dick’s 1978 article “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (emphasis mine): The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must

Happy Birthday to ion

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. One year ago, on this day, we launched ion, the ipod charger. The launch was just one blog post. That’s it. Within two hours, Atul Chitnis bought the first ion in our online store. We celebrated. But

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

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

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.

Web dev frameworks vs RIA

How do traditional web development frameworks cope with RIAs? By RIAs, I am referring to the Flex/Silverlight model (Ajax has a hybrid model in my view, so I’m not discussing that here since I don’t want to muddle up the question). Coming back to topic, I see

Last day at Adobe

As Jeff Atwood said recently in his entry on Choosing Your Own Adventure: I’ve spent the last six months staring at this page trying to figure out what to do. With some trepidation, I’m now turning to page 10. Thursday will be my last day at Vertigo. I

Thought for the Day

The world is a comedy for those who think; a tragedy for those who feel. — Horace Walpole

Aware Songs

Is it just me or are there really so many “aware” songs out there in the past few years… And so many good ones at that too. From self-aware songs: * Meant To Live by Switchfoot * One Thing by Finger Eleven * Welcome To My Life by Simple Plan * Harder To Breathe

Guess who?

It’s Ravana. Watch the trailer if you don’t believe me. Ashok Banker is on a roll: … 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

A Business Mind

From Tina Seelig’s talk on “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20”: … I also have the honour of participating in the new Stanford D-School, the design institute. Last quarter, I was invited to teach one week on entrepreneurship. So I figured out how do I distill this

What is NDTV’s online strategy?

I wonder if all of these are actually part of some game plan: * ndtv.com * ndtvtravels.com * ndtvgadgets.com * ndtvshopping.com * ndtvlumiere.com * ndtvmovies.com * ndtvmusic.com * ndtvgoodtimes.com * ndtvcooks.com * ndtvprofit.com * ndtvimagine.com * doctorndtv.com * cricketndtv.com * etc. It looks to me like they’re trying to mimic

A productive homepage

I recently started using my own home page in Firefox as a start-point for all the important links that I should visit from time to time. It’s been a good boost for productivity since it keeps the main thing the main thing: This was just a simple ‘idealet’ inspired

How about an Indian amateur music album?

My latest “power song” is the flagship song of the Colourblind band. Who are these guys? I have no idea. From what I read on their website, they were/are a couple of rockers who got their album recorded with Sony Music India in 1999. Not sure how many copies

Two unofficial traffic rules in India

1. Ignore all honking. Most of the honking is by nincompoops who want to save 30 seconds in travel but waste away their lives during the rest of the day. * Solution: We should ban all horns. It’s purpose has been lost. Reduce the noise pollution, please. 2. Never drive

Technology can be beautiful

This is a pen called “D:Scribe”, a design by Reuben Png and was featured on the Yanko Designs blog: I personally prefer to write with pen and paper. However, I end up eventually transferring it to the computer for all the goodness of digital material (rewritable, linkable, searchable, backup-able,

Why does crowdsourcing work?

Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 makes it clear that “crowdsourcing” is one of the defining features of Web 2.0, not only RIAs: “The service automatically gets better the more people use it.” Crowdsourcing is about taking it to the next step where people ‘contribute’ something

Friendship Formula

Depth of friendship ∝ Time spent willingly × Sharing My observation is that nothing else matters as much as these two factors. P.S. I got the idea of sharing being a major factor from Srikanth Thunga (whose blog doesn’t seem to be alive any more).

Searches leading to this website

I gleaned this from a random look at the website logs for two weeks. P.S. What does he/she mean by using orkut effectively? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

It’s the journey lah!

On Day 14 of my Singapore trip (Jan 04, 2008), it was time to head back home. It was a mixed bag for me. On one hand, I felt so liberated experiencing a vacation which seemed overdue. On the other hand, I was rearing to get back to my realities

Dream Running Route

I have this notion that you don’t get to really know a city until you’ve run in it. So, I ran a couple of times in my Singapore trip, and I liked the route so much that on Day 13 (Thu, Jan 03, 2008), I started taking photos.

Urban Development

Around the recent gastroenteritis scare in Bangalore, NDTV was running a poll: Then, there was this whole one hour dedicated to hearing viewpoints from Veerappa Moily, Swathi Ramanathan and the general public regarding Bangalore’s infrastructure. Okay, okay, I know most of you by now are saying “Oh, come on,

Pulau Ubin Island

My favorite memories of my Singapore trip is Day 9 (Dec 30 Sun). We went to Pulau Ubin island. What is the only activity on this island? Cycling. It was fun to see people of all ages, from families to large groups of teenagers to avid cyclists all here for

Useful Websites for India

Like a broken record, I keep coming back to What are the killer web applications for India? So, I decided to make a list. A list of websites that are useful for most people in India. But what kind of websites am I looking at? The website should be something

How to defend India?

I’ve been provoked and I can’t stop thinking about it. Incident 1. It all started on Day 2 of my Singapore trip (Dec 23 Sun) when a hotel owner was too friendly. Maybe he didn’t have much work, but anyway, he got pretty chatty with us and

Promenade in Esplanade

On Day 7 (Dec 28, 2007) of the Singapore Trip, I visited the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay. Esplanade can be compared to a jumbo-sized version of our own Rangashankara but on a much grander scale – while Rangashankara is a place where plays are produced and played (pun intended), Esplanade

Sankranti Rituals

We need more articles like this one by Prof Dr Geetha Viswanathan (emphasis mine): Makara Sankranti, also called the harvest festival or Pongal, falls on January, 14 or 15, when the sun passes from one zodiac sign to another. This festival marks the beginning of Sun’s journey to northern

How to recognize an American tourist?

True story. On Day 7 of my Singapore trip (Dec 28, 2007), Chinmay and myself were at ‘The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf’ shop. The lady in front of us in the queue said this. When we heard this, both of us looked at each other, with the look that meant

Ancient or Modern Society?

On Day 5 of my Singapore trip (Dec 26 Wed), Abishek and myself visited the Greek Masterpieces from Louvre exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore. This was the largest collection ever to be allowed to be borrowed from the famous Louvre museum in Paris (which you might have heard

Innovation in Indian universities?

A while ago, I was asking myself Where are the killer applications on the web for India? Today, when I read ReadWriteWeb’s article on The State of Innovation in India, a thought struck me about the relationship between innovation and universities. Everyone knows the story of about how many

Hitting the books

It was Day 2 of my trip (Dec 23 Sun). My plan was to go in the DHL balloon so that I can get a good view of Singapore. When I reached the MRT station, I suddenly got interested in randomly walking around. I really wanted to see the place.

Utopia

I never really could imagine what Utopia could be like, but having stayed in Singapore for more than a week, I can say I don’t need to imagine it, it’s already here. To be frank, it’s spooky, it’s eerie. I think it’s something taken straight

Singapore

The past month, I have been experiencing what I can only describe as a burnout). When I think about it, I have been juggling too many things, but they were not extraordinary tasks, so I wonder why I felt ‘stressed’. Things have been so hectic that I even missed foss.

Web Innovation 2007 Day 2

Yesterday, I attended Day 2 of the Web Innovation 2007 conference. The irony to note is that the conference website is so NOT Web 2.0. For example, where are the slides that people can download? These guys can learn a thing or two from the foss.in website and

Web Innovation 2007 Day 1

Yesterday, I attended Day 1 of the Web Innovation 2007 conference. The first half of the day was quite useful, but the latter half turned out to be pure marketing pitches by the sponsors. First and foremost, I think the title of the conference is a misnomer. Although it says

First Bangalore Ultra Marathon

Today, I caught the 4.45 am transportation to get to ONV for the first ever Bangalore Ultra Marathon where people can get to run or walk 26 or 52 or 78 or 104 km. A true endurance event. I participated in the 26K run. I can’t even imagine

Why I am not running the BSNL Bangalore International Marathon

There has been a lot of press mentions lately about the BSNL Bangalore International Marathon which is going to happen tomorrow. I will not be running it because it is not intended for people who love running. Why do I say that? The Bangalore Ultra Marathon was announced eleven months

Best quote I’ve read in a while

From New York Times, November 26, 1991: DOS computers, made by I.B.M., Compaq, Tandy and about a million other companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans will note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that

Vegetable 2.0

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. The other day, mom was telling me why she has completely switched from the traditional neighbourhood HOPCOMS (Horticultural Produce Cooperative Marketing Societies) outlet to the fresh@ store to buy the vegetables. I got curious and asked to explain.

Analyze this

Remember the Lex tool that we used in college days? Ever wondered who wrote it? It was Eric Schmidt, along with Mike Lesk. That’s right, the CEO of Google. I can imagine the CTO of a company to have such a background, but I never would have expected the

Effective Vim

Being a fan of Steve Yegge, I was randomly reading some of his older writings and eventually chanced upon his post on “Effective Emacs”. Being a Vim guy, I wondered whether some of the tips he presents are useful for the Vim world as well. Note: This is not a

ion on a roll

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. First, there was the Mint financial newspaper’s article on “casualpreneurs” in the July 8th, 2007 edition which featured ion.  FYI, Mint is a joint collaboration between the Hindustan Times and the Wall Street Journal. Then, there was

Getaway

A weekend getaway can do wonders for you.

Closed source on Linux is hard

Update: Please read the article carefully before commenting. If you notice, most of the problems being described here is part of Eclipse, which is open source. So, usability issues are faced by open source programs as well, and not just proprietary programs on Linux. The reason I wrote that title

raison d’être

What’s your reason for living? “We are in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can to figure this whole thing out.” — The Quarter-Life Crisis.

Hack Day videos

Kamla Bhatt has been tracking the Hack Day India and posting many interviews and videos. The videos include the demos by the hackers, and here’s the video where we present (from minutes 03:10 to 05:09) : Update : And a mention in the Financial Express :)

Hack Day India

I was at Yahoo! Open Hack Day at Bangalore on Friday and Saturday. 24 hours of hacking, meeting lots of old friends, and sarcasm unlimited. It doesn’t get better than this. * 2007-10-05 Fri 02:30 PM * Arrived at Taj. * Registered myself, got the schwag * Met Raghu and discussed the

Announcing Flex Builder on Linux

Now presenting the alpha of the Flex Builder IDE on Linux! (this was announced at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference). You can now create Flex projects, write code with intellisense-like hinting, compile and debug all within an IDE based on Eclipse, on Linux. You heard it right, it’s officially

Why students and open source?

Two days before the BMS College Information Science Department Fest called “Genesis 2007”, I received an email from a couple of students asking me to talk about “introduction to open source”. Apparently, they were frantically looking for a speaker. Since I’m not the right person for this, I agreed

OpenCoffeeClub 2

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. Yesterday morning, I dropped in on the OpenCoffeeClub Bangalore, 2nd edition. It’s supposed to be a place where people interested in entrepreneurship show up, have coffee together and discuss. The theme of the meet was marketing. There

Biking to Hogenakkal

Aug 10 2007 Fri 6 pm. After missing the last night drive that Azmi and Rishi went to, I wanted to go for a night drive too, and Azmi was happy to oblige. At 10pm, I was at his house. We opened up Google Maps, MapMyIndia and the Weather.com.

All your machines are belong to us

I have a Windows laptop and a Linux desktop at office, and I had this problem of interoperating between the two machines. That’s when I installed a neat utility called Synergy. Now, I can copy some text to the clipboard in the laptop and paste it to my browser

Software as a living organism

I propose that we classify software as a living organism. No, I’m not referring to Ms. Dewey. I am thinking about software in general. Let’s see… Someone fathers (or mothers) the code and brings it to life. They showcase it to the world, either by photos and glimpses

What really happens with feedback forms…

That reminds me, it’s been a while since I read The Daily WTF.

ion logo designs

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. One of the many parts in the creation of ion was the designing of the look and feel of the product. We do very limited direct selling (we sell mostly online) and from what I’ve seen, people

Alias

This website is now available at both www.swaroopch.com and www.swaroopch.info. Officially, my website is now www.swaroopch.com. Why? Because the iPhone has a “.com” button on its keypad. Well, there’s another reason too. It’s because the .info domain was registered a long time

Marathons in India in 2007

Is it just me or is running becoming popular in India? Take a look at this marathon schedule: 2007 Aug Mysore Half Marathon 2007 Sep Bangalore Times Marathon 2007 Oct Delhi Hutch Half Marathon 2007 Nov Hyderabad Half Marathon 2007 Dec Bangalore RFL Ultra Marathon 2008 Jan Stanchart Mumbai Marathon

Big Bazaar, India Central, Future Dreams

I recently read the “It Happened in India” book. It is the story of Kishore Biyani, the man who created Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Bangalore/Hyderabad Central, EZone, and much much more – effectively, the one person who made retailing a roaring success in India and who had envisioned it much before

Mumbai Family Trip

It was a crazy 4 day trip. Crazy because it was 8 related families going together, that’s a total of 23 people. 23. It should be easy to imagine the cacophony that followed… The highlights of the trip was something like this: sultry mumbai atmosphere, hare krishna mandir, watching

Moxie . AdvancedDataGrid . OutInTheWild()

Flex 3 beta 1 is out, and along with it something that I’ve been part of – the AdvancedDataGrid component. An example built using the AdvancedDataGrid is embedded below (it is a SWF file, requires Flash Player 9 for viewing): Notice the tree view within a grid – that alone is

Why iCon

I read the iCon book recently and have been wondering what makes people (like me) so fascinated about Steve Jobs? * He didn’t create any great technology or product, it was people who worked with him who did all that, for example, Steve Wozniak and John Lasseter. * He was a

Look out for the new RadioVeRVe

Shreyas, Gaurav and the gang have relaunched RadioVeRVe and it now rocks even more than before! Things they haven’t changed: * They play music by independent bands from India. That’s right, these are all Indian bands. Things I liked: * The new look feels good and is intuitive. How’d

Widget for Webaroo Gupshup

Microblogging seems to be the rage these days, so I was looking at Indian alternatives to Twitter, and I found Webaroo Gupshup (later I realized that I had already received an invite but hadn’t paid attention to it). Gupshup seems to hit the sweet spot in the Indian context

Thought for the Day

“When a friend moves away, they leave behind silence.”

Midnight Marathon

The World’s First Midnight Marathon took place right here in Bangalore on Saturday midnight. It was held in the area surrounding the iGate office near ITPL. Niara and myself had decided to run the half-marathon. We didn’t even think about the full marathon because we have had no

ionized

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. The past couple of weeks has been a rollercoaster ride for us and for ion. Sales has been very good so far, but our observation is that people in India are still hesitant to buy online from reasons

yahoo ishtyle parikrma

After a long wait, the Nandini Layout children sponsored by Yahoo! Bangalore Employees get their own school. And I’m so glad to see that the yahoo sense of humor and style remains: Many of these ideas were pitched in by Shivashankari, one of the most passionate yahoos I’ve

Interview of Abishek Nair

My friend Abishek Nair and myself were recently having a conversation over email where I kept prodding him about what he’s going to do next. You see, being a Bangalorean, he’s not a software engineer! He’s a vfx whiz. In normal English, that means he’s one

Evolution of Adobe Flex : now open source

That’s right, the Flex SDK is going to be licensed under the Mozilla Public License – this means the compiler, debugger, the huge libraries – it’s all going to be open source when Flex 3 “Moxie” is going to be released. This news was not so surprising to me because

ion and the police

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. This incident happened about three weeks ago when the preparations for ion were in full swing, and Vikram and myself worked all day long to create the posters for ion as well as the website itself. At one

The ion : ipod charger, mobile charger and more

For the past couple of months, I’ve had very busy weekends because I’ve been helping out a couple of friends launch a product. Why talk about it today? Because today is launch day! I’m talking about “the ion” – a charger for your iPod. Get the ion, plug

Big Brother

Long ago, I had seen Nat Friedman show off a small Mono app that displayed the amount of time you spent on each application, and updated the chart in real time – so that you could clearly make out how much time you’re spending in the browser and how much

pink-e

Looks like someone sure loves email!

Outlook on Linux : Evolution Exchange

My laptop at work has some network configuration issue (I think) leading to Outlook not finding the server – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But every other application uses the internet/intranet just fine. Only Outlook doesn’t work and I’m tired of reading the mails from a

Sights of a little town

I visited my “native place” Holenarsipura after a gap of one year… it felt good to be back in a little town. Better yet, was getting out of the house at 5.30 am to go for a run, get distracted by a huge green field, and then cross the

Why p2p in a browser

When Opera announced BitTorrent support within the browser (two years ago!), it never made sense to me. After attending Dr. Satish Menon’s “Video Goes Viral” talk yesterday, I am convinced that is the way to go. The funny thing is that there are no benefits to the user, if

Moxie

Yep, Moxie. That’s the codename for the next version of Flex. And it was one of the suggestions by yours truly in the internal discussions. Why this name? My reasoning was: flex -> strength -> http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/strength -> mana, pizzazz, moxie, thew, … Ely liked the

Touch of a computer

Jeff Han’s “touch-driven computer screen” is so cool. That would make things so much easier to organize my photos, heh. But I wonder how ergonomic it would be since we will have to be looking down at the screen all the time and it would not be at the

It’s all in the mind

(Warning : I just started typing this post because the title popped into my head, so what follows might seem like a lot of rambling.) No matter how much we talk about talent, opportunities, and other things we can blame on, making things happen basically boils down to one thing – it’

Should it be called a phone?

I lost my mobile phone recently. The funny thing is that I do miss my w800i but not for the phone call functionality, but for: * alarm (I didn’t wake up early today because of this) * notes-taking utility (for those sudden random thoughts that I don’t want to forget)

proto.in

I was fortunate to attend proto.in in Chennai on Sunday. What was it all about? It’s about startups in India. It was the opportunity for an Indian entrepreneur to showcase his/her ideas and business plans, to look for funding, people to work with, partners or simply grab

But Flex is not open source…

My manager and myself were having an informal chat about the various RIA frameworks and platforms out there. To be honest, I wasn’t convinced about Flex and so, we kept on discussing the pros and cons, and it turned out that I learnt a bit about Flex this way.

Future Adobeans Needed

Quick note: * Adobe needs some Perl developers urgently. * Also, proficient developers with 2+ years (upto 15… but 15+ is also good…) experience needed. If you’re interested, shoot me a mail. Update : The above two requirements are separate.

Happy New …

New Year, New Problems, New Resolutions, New Disappointments. Same person. Following the “people developer” Pavlina’s advice, I have chosen my primary focus for the year… so far it’s already worked out good. One thing I’ve realized is that things are gonna change only at the cost of

Code Runway

What if there was a Project Runway or even an American Chopper show for programming… what would be the (minimal set of) qualities to judge on? * Elegance (of algorithm, of code) * Simple flow * Attention to detail (corner cases) * Efficiency * Scalability * “It Just Works” * … hmm, what else?

My first Adsense cheque

After opening a strange envelope with a Sweden stamp on it, I was holding my first Google Adsense cheque. Not only did I get money, but later in the day, Google (Mail) gave me career advice as well: Heh.

Brahmagiri

A couple of weekends ago, most of the trekware gang met up for a weekend trek. This time we headed to Brahmagiri. To reach Brahmagiri, take the bus to kuTTa (Madikeri district) but get down in Srimangala. Meet the forest officer (they come in at around 10 am) and it

Thought for the Day

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.â€?  — Martin Luther King, Jr. “A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the

Musical Weekend

Although it started with sports, it turned out to be a musical weekend. Saturday afternoon : Parikrma Senior Sports Day Parikrma had a sports meet of the senior children among all its various schools – from Jayanagar to Sahakarnagar, and it was amazing to see all the boisterous children compete against each

What’s in a name?

$150,000. That’s what’s in a name. That’s how much Microsoft paid for the name “Zune”: According to Boslet, Placek cited several other reasons for zeroing in on “Zune”: * It’s a short word, reflecting the gadget’s small size. * It has a familiar sound. “‘From tune

foss.in 2006

The past 3 days of foss.in/2006 have been very interesting. As Gopal said, this conference is in the hallways. I’ve seen/had a fair share of amazing conversations from watching a passionate debate of companies “exploiting” people by getting them to work on their open source product

Bangalore Book Festival

I managed to catch the last day of the Bangalore Book Festival 2006 – I was surprised to see the number of people thronging the fair! It was truly a family affair – and we bought nearly a dozen books ranging from spiritual to tech to comics to Sherlock Holmes :). I’m

Engagement Platform

If you were skeptical about Apollo (, Flash, Flex, …) like me, then you must watch this video by Todd Hay, Director, Platform Marketing & Developer Relations, Adobe. The RIA that he demoed was really something that would be amazing to use. More at adobe.com/devnet/platform/. (via MNR)

Anthargange

It seemed the long run on Saturday was not enough, so we took off early on Sunday morning as well, but this time in a car instead of on foot. We headed towards Anthargange. Supposedly, it is a spring (source of water) which explains the name. We were interested because

Keep on Running

I chanced upon this wonderful song by Eliane Elias: I’m not afraid All is forgiven Coz after all What’s done is done Move on with grace Slippin’ to space And when I’m ready, I’ll sing my song Follow the silence far from the sadness Leave all

Adobe

First Day Today was my first day at Adobe. A month ago, it was so difficult for me to imagine going to a new place, working with new people, and entering a totally new field of work. Today, it was surprisingly easy. Perhaps it is a poignant reminder that the

Trip to the Dark Side

Wanting to do something different, yesterday I made a short dash (if you can call a 12-hour bus journey a ‘dash’…) to Hyderabad to visit an ex-yahoo colleague Kiran as well as a few other friends. And I visited the Microsoft campus :) What’s the first thing I saw? People

Keep ideating

Yesterday night, I met St. John Goldfinger and Paul Jenkins for dinner. They are technology entrepreneurs based in the UK. They were in Bangalore for the EU-Karnataka Asia IT Enterprise 2006 Conference (quite a mouthful) basically looking out for companies to collaborate with on many of their projects. They wanted

PowerBook for sale

Anybody interested in buying my PowerBook? ![11150079][Small][] The only reason to sell it is because I hardly use it any more, even though it’s in perfect working condition. For those interested, I might throw in my copy of iWork for free (which costs a separate $79). To recap

Last day

Today’s my last day at Yahoo!. It’s been a great two and a half years. Sadly, it’s time to move on. I was just recollecting today about how much history I have here and how many things I’m leaving behind. Moving on is not easy, especially

Shortcuts

I am getting really addicted to Open Shortcuts in conjunction with the search bar in Firefox. For example, just type !wiki bangalore and it’ll search wikipedia for you without having to do the 3-step process of opening wikipedia.org, then entering the search query and clicking on ‘go’. You

Hard Questions

1. Where do you see yourself 5 years from now? 2. Should your life have a purpose? What if you don’t know what exactly you want to do? 3. How do you know when you’re happy and truly achieved something? 4. Ever inspired by Norvig’s speech? 5.

Forty Two

I completed the full marathon i.e. 42 km on Sunday in the Bangalore International Marathon 2006. Well, barely completed. After running the first 21 km in 2.5 hours, I was elated at my good timing, but then the worst thing (for a runner) happened – cramps. I just couldn’

Culture

After an encounter with a firangee person, Vikram and myself started talking about difference in cultures. For example, how doors are opened or closed. In USA, doors are pulled to get in but pushed to get out. Why? If there’s an emergency, it’s easier to push yourself through

Cycling

Partly inspired by my gang’s craziness, and partly inspired by Shree, I bought a cycle a month ago, and I’ve been cycling to work on 2-3 days in a week ever since. Some observations : * People who drive in Bangalore have no respect for cyclists. * The assumption is that

Thought for the Day

“Dreams, ideas, and plans not only are an escape, they give me purpose, a reason to hang on.” — Steven Callahan

Super

You know you’re a happy man when you come back home from work, and your kid sister has a beaming smile on her face and she shows you the cartoon she painted depicting you as a superhero.

check_gmail

I’ts amazing what you can whip up in just 15 minutes using CPAN (including reading the documentation). #!/usr/bin/env perl use warnings; use strict; =head1 INTRODUCTION Checks if there are new unread messages in your GMail Inbox. =head1 USAGE $ perl check_gmail.pl 1       Swaroop C H     Looks

Parikrma kids visit Yahoo!

A couple of weeks ago (on July 7th), we had a YEFI Day at work. YEFI stands for Yahoo! Employee Foundation India. As part of the celebrations, we got the Parikrma kids to come and visit our Yahoo! offices. The Jayanagar children (who see me every Saturday) visited the M

Running

Today, I achieved 34 km. Yeah, my stamina has improved. Here’s some of the “running gyaan” I’ve collected over the past few months: * Learn to listen to your body * Learn to distinguish between feeling tired or just feeling fatigue, feeling the need for water and the need to

Mullainagiri and Bababudangiri

In the first weekend of this month, my trekking gang and myself went to Mullainagiri and Bababudangiri for trekking. We’ve never experienced a “monsoon trek” / “rain trek”, so this was our chance to go for it. I’ve done the Mullainagiri trek before and I was quite looking forward

map(’perl’, ‘india’)

From the latest Perl.com newsletter* : Did you know that the country with the second-largest number of Perl.com readers is India?  That’s right!  Greetings to everyone on the subcontinent; tell your friends about us. * It’s ironic that an O’Reilly site’s newsletter is not archived anywhere

Motivation

When I look at people around me, I often ponder how they manage to live life just like any other day. They tackle work and fun and go home and watch TV and sleep. Then, get up the next day and the cycle continues. I think of them as analogous

Ubuntu

After reading about Mark Pilgrim’s famous switch from Mac OS X to Ubuntu along with his list of must-use stuff, I installed Ubuntu Linux on my system (and removed Fedora Linux in the process…) First impressions: * It is fast. Here’s where I say “Bye Bye Fedora”. Firefox runs

Just Tune In

I’m getting addicted to RadioVerve.  Keep up the good work guys!

Keeping track of pages?

We have aggregators to keep track of RSS/Atom feeds. But how do we keep track of pages that don’t have any feeds?

Night Drive

A month ago. Saturday evening. Calls at 7.30 pm. 5 friends arrive at 9 pm. We take out the Karnataka map and decide where to go. I suggested that we plan such that we can go to Shivagange for the sunrise and that we should take the shortest route

Linkblog

I follow a few friends’ linkblogs and find them quite useful. So I thought why not add one for my site too? I’ve now added the linkblog in the sidebar. If you want to directly read the linkblog, here are the links (kinda recursive, ain’t it?): * Linkblog page

Brazilian Portuguese Bytes of Python

Samuel Dias Neto has translated “A Byte of Python” to Brazilian Portuguese. Hats off to Sam! Update on 2011-Sep-01: Link updated

Always on software

There are three software that are always open for me at work: 1. Konsole – for coding 2. Firefox – for email, internal websites, news, etc. 3. Gaim – for talking to colleagues It’s interesting that I don’t use anything else at all. Hmm, I can’t get anything done if

The Search

I just finished reading ‘The Search’ by John Battelle. What an amazing story to read. Learning about Bill Gross and his IdeaLab alone was worth reading the book, and he still keeps ideating, like Snap.com. Heck, even Picasa came from IdeaLab. There are many tidbits from the book that

Thought for the day

Plans get you into things but you’ve got to work your way out. — Will Rogers

Google has its eyes on India

From a Times of India article: Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt has predicted that India and not China will become the world’s biggest Internet market in “about five or ten years from now, based on current trends.” And what’s more, Schmidt’s other futurist view is that

Tadiyandamol

Some weeks ago, 8 of us yahoos went to Tadiyandamol for trekking. Directions to reach Tadiyandamol : Take the bus from Bangalore to Virajpet. Catch a local bus to Kaikamba, which comes before Kakkabe. From there, you can ask the locals for “raja mane” (King’s house) and you can start

Wah, Kya Theme Hain

Chug’s awesome design for my website has been getting great reviews and has been featured on many design review sites: 1. Design Meltdown 2. WordPress Gallery 3. Screenblog 4. WebCreme 5. Nidha 6. Web Design Archive 7. CSSMania 8. CSS Remix

Malaysia Day 4

21st March, 2006, Tuesday It was Day 4 of the Malaysia trip, the last day. So much stuff had happened in the last 3 days, that I actually woke up early, and wrote down everything I wanted to remember in a notebook and wrote for an hour. Then, I went

Malaysia Day 3

(Continuing my tale of Malaysia…) 20th March, 2006, Monday The third day morning, we went to the Batu Caves where the Murugan temple is located. The huge golden colored statue of Lord Murugan was a sight to behold. There were quite a number of visitors for a Monday morning. I

Thought for the Day

Who is wise?  He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful?  He that governs his passions. Who is rich?  He that is content. Who is that?  Nobody. — Benjamin Franklin

Can you answer this?

Yahoo! India launches http://in.answers.yahoo.com. So can you answer these questions? * Did I do a bad job of raising my son? * How can we say that we’re alive? * When I get off at Bangalore aiport, how much will the elephant ride to my hotel cost? * Why

How to use Vim with Firefox

If you’re a Vim user like me, you would’ve wished many a time that you could use Vim to edit text in Firefox. Too bad, the Mozex extension doesn’t work anymore. Thanks to Samuel Wright, I have now discovered another way to achieve the same – using the

Marathon postponed

The Bangalore Marathon has been postponed from May 14 to September, 2006. This is so disappointing. I had not participated in last year’s marathon because I wasn’t fit for it, but I had made up my mind to participate this year. So, I’ve been training with a

Yahoo! Bangalore Hack Day

We had our first “hack day” at work today. The idea is simple – you get one full day (starting from 00:01 hours) to hack on your own original idea and you have to present it at 4 in the afternoon to your whole office. At the end, a set

New swaroopch.info theme

I was starting to get bored with my website design (even though I really liked it), so I hired the talented Chugs‘s services and he came up with a really simple and colorful design, and it’s live now. Note: There are still some quirks to be worked out

Malaysia Day 2

19th March, 2006, Sunday The second day morning, I got up early but I was not in time for sunrise, I went out for a walk alone anyway, and got to see a lazy Kuala Lumpur waking up. I strolled for about half an hour and went quite a distance,

Ex-Yahoos start up

Himanshu Nautiyal, Ruban Phukan and Rajesh Warrier – three ex-yahoos from Bangalore, who now call themselves as RHR Networks Pvt. Ltd, seem to be dabbling in quite a number of things : * PixRat – Bookmark and Tag Photos from the Web (it got techcrunched recently) * GlogBlog – Bangalore Classifieds * Bixee – Search Jobs from all

Mark of respect?

A legend is no more. Dr. Rajkumar was the defining person in the Kannada film industry. I remember his old black and white Kannada movies, especially the ones where he plays the CID investigator… those were such wonderful movies, they had a real story, amazing acting and such pleasant simple

Malaysia Day 1

Finally, I’m getting around to writing about my Malaysia trip… About six months ago, my cousins and myself had been to Talkad to show the beach to the youngest of the cousins (< 10 years old), and during the journey, I planted the idea of watching a Formula 1 Grand

Dreamer to Dapper

I hereby announce the coinage of “The Dappers Rule”*. * assuming we live up to the principle ourselves ;-). Do anything with full josh and full hosh — Swaroop

Kannada Wikipedia Meet

Today, I attended the Kannada Wikipedia Meet after reading a mention of it in today’s edition of the Deccan Herald. Unfortunately, I was late and missed the keynote speech by U R Ananthamurthy. When I came in, Professor G Venkatasubbiah  had just started talking about ‘Kannada on Encyclopedia’. The

Car PC, anyone?

From The Hindu: In a bid to take computers to the rural communities in India, global chip major Intel unveiled on Wednesday a new Ruggedised Personal Computer platform designed to withstand adverse weather conditions including heat, dust and humidity and run on alternate power sources, including the car battery.

Goodbye is the hardest word to say

With the loss of a loved one, you realize how much time you want to spend with your family and how much time you actually do spend. And though my flesh is gone, whoa I’ll still be with you at all times And although my body’s gone, oh

GVim

A message by Bram on vim-announce: The past few years many people have sponsored my work on Vim.  Now version 7 is nearing completion, beta testing will start soon, very soon.  A big thanks to all who supported me!  I would not have been able to do this without your

Truly Formulasia

I had won 2 passes to the Radio City Live concert because I had voted for 2 bands which made it to the RCL concert but too bad, I couldn’t use it myself, because I’m off to Malaysia tonight to watch the Sepang Formula 1 Grand Prix.

Mukthi

Today, I talked at Mukthi 6.03 at M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology. First of all, M S Ramaiah is a huge campus. So huge that the students actually tell the teachers that they were late for class because they couldn’t find the class, and that’s a

German Bytes of Python

Yesterday, I got this mail from Christoph Zwerschke: Thanks a lot for “A Byte of Python”. Since I thought it would be great if Python gets more popular in German, I participated in the German translation project at BerliOS started by Lutz Horn. Unfortunately, the translation progress stalled last year

Radio City Live

I voted for Swarathma and Phenom today evening, and these two were the most-voted bands today :-) I totally digged the Kannada song that Swarathma played.

Have you seen Bangalore like this?

CL2

I just can’t wait. Update on 14th April : It has arrived.

How Products Are Made

It is interesting to read the raw materials, design and manufacturing of a computer mouse. I should spend more time exploring this site MadeHow.com. (via Yahoo! Picks)

Kumara Parvatha

Last weekend, my trekking gang and myself went to Kumara Parvatha – the place I had heard so much about – “the toughest trek in Karnataka”, “the 2nd highest peak in Karnataka”, and so on. It turned out to be all that and much more. Unlike many of our previous treks, this

Stepping stone

I got into a random think mode, and I realized that in the past two years, I have had more failures than successes. Some painful failures. Some memorable successes. Yet, the point that the failures were more in number bothers me. This article by Pavlina has advice that helps : Understand

Paper

Long live Paper! The simplest solution is always the best solution — Swaroop Update : It seems this is my subconcious paraphrasing of Occam’s Razor principle.

Byte of Python is now a wiki

In a recent discussion on the byte-of-python list, an enthusiastic bunch of people were interested in seeing A Byte of Python available as a wiki so that readers can contribute directly as well. So, I followed up and made this announcement on the list recently : Hello all, As we have

Rama Devara Betta

Rama Devara Betta (literally, Lord Rama’s Hill) is located just behind the Siddaganga mutt on Tumkur Road, and is about 60+ km from Bangalore. A couple of friends and myself went there yesterday to trek. There was a trail that led to the top of the hill but we

MCC FOSS Day

Yesterday, I talked about Python at the FOSS Day at Mount Carmel College For Women. I was not able to attend the earlier sessions in the day because my team (at work) is making a release soon and as expected, that means crunch time. I managed to make time for

ShowMeDo

Ian Ozsvald and Kyran Dale have created ShowMeDo.com which is a hub for video tutorials. Very interesting idea! Currently, it has a special emphasis on Python. This should be helpful for beginners and perhaps teach experts a trick or two as well. I found the Debugging with WinPDB video

4 things

Usually I don’t pay attention to memes because everybody’s doing it at the same time and it gets boring quickly, but for once, I decided to play along. Pradeep has tagged me to make lists of four things. So here goes: Four movies I can watch over and

Sunrise at Devarayanadurga

![95657707][Small][] ![95658236][Small][] ![95658754][Small][] ![95659236][Small][] ![95659475][Small][] ![95659647][Small][] ![95659705][Small][] ![95659807][Small][] ![95659883][Small][] ![95659994][Small][] ![95660140][Small][] ![95660206][Small][] ![95660266][Small][] ![95660401][Small][] ![95660482][Small][] ![95660645][Small][] ![95661020][Small][] ![95661155][Small][] ![95661314][Small][] ![95662018][Small][]

Ain’t nobody

Saw this on a T-shirt: Nobody is perfect. I am nobody.

Purani Jeans

A happy moment for me – my old jeans fit me again. The 5 km jogs (5 days a week) have finally paid off. I have now progressed to 8 km (almost every) day – 1 km walk + 5 km jog + 2 km walk. It’s almost funny how, 6 months ago,

Happy Republic Day

![91279468][Small][] It was inspiring to listen to President Kalam when he was interacting with the children in CNN-IBN’s programme “All the President’s children.” He spoke about Vision 2020, about how children should get rid of corruption by approaching their parents, and his repeated message that the “540

Lalbagh Flower Show

The Lalbagh Flower Show turned out to be great. The flower arrangements were a feast for the eyes, especially for those with a photographic eye, although most people were point-and-click-photographers like me. ![89764990][Small][] ![89758774][Small][] ![89772640][Small][] ![89774260][Small][] ![89751772][Small][] ![89753307][Small][] ![89755763][Small][] ![89757899][Small][] ![89762236][Small]

Tourism Fair

I visited the Travel and Tourism Fair yesterday at Kanteerava Stadium. It turned out to be a damp squib. ![89657783][Small][] ![89658006][Small][] First of all, the show turned out to be nothing but a big place of tourist agents hawking at customers, and the presentations of the respective states

Helphones

I wish my helmet had built-in speakers and I could just plug in my iPod (or any mp3 player) into it.

Physically here…

… but my mind is still there : ![85600405][Medium][]

The Dalhousie Trip

I’m writing this a few days after coming back to Bangalore, because I had to get over my holiday hangover. It seems unfair to gain so much, make so many new friends and have so much fun, and suddenly let it go, and that too, back to the daily

Off to Himalayas

I’m finally getting a vacation, so I’m off to trek in the foothills of the Himalayas. Incidentally, my new year celebration will be trekking 10 km in the snow, from Khajjar to Mangla.

Jump

Gopal, I’ve added the jump feature, but sorry, no UI for it :-)

ShreeKumar cycling again

ShreeKumar’s at it again: It’s december, and I am bitten by the travel bug again. This time, I intend to cover the areas on the western coast of India on my cycle. The trip would cover 2000+ kms of gruelling terrain and span 21 days ! From Mangalore, I

Dakshina Kannada Police

I would’ve never expected to see the Dakshana Kannada Police blogging. They have updates on the ZP/TP election results. Also, they have entries in Kannada. (via Sharath)

Hebbe Falls Trek

![72745385][Thumbnail][] ![72745605][Thumbnail][] ![72745691][Thumbnail][] ![72746989][Thumbnail][] ![72747478][Thumbnail][] ![72749002][Thumbnail][] ![72751030][Thumbnail][] ![72752430][Thumbnail][] ![72752932][Thumbnail][] ![72753014][Thumbnail][] ![72753167][Thumbnail][] ![72753251][Thumbnail][] ![72753752][Thumbnail][] From riding on the roof of the jeep, to walking 10 km, to diving in freezin’ cold water, to feasting our eyes to lush

Criccer

Criccer … I don’t know what else to call it. This was a game that is a cross between cricket and soccer, being played in the stadium/grounds near my home. The bowler throws the football and the batsman bats by kicking the football, and then runs. All the other

Linux Can!

Watch the Linux Can! video (I took yesterday night) now! I just can’t get that tune out of my head … Update : The video is now available on Google Video.

foss.in day 4

Yesterday was such a long and awesome day. The day started with me missing Taj’s talk on Entropy and I’m still kicking myself for that one. I attended Gora’s talk on IndLinux efforts and I got to know about the various efforts in localization and translations going

foss.in day 3

Today, the keynote address was by Andrew Cowie on Inside|Outside, and it was a brilliant talk. Cowie is a very animated and fun person. The talk was about how people are on the inside or outside of the community and what it takes to cross over. He gave various

Django SQLite3 patch

A patch I had submitted to Django for the SQLite3 backend, 3 months ago, finally made it through (suitably modified by Adrian). It was a nice surprise to see my name in the list of contributors :-)

foss.in day 2

Today morning, the first session was a Linux Kernel roadmap by Jonathan Corbet. Although I’ve never been a kernel-level guy, the talk was interesting and he clearly explained how features have been added and improved over the various versions, and how the development process has improved and become more

Insertion sort, anyone?

Niara is wondering if that’s the right approach for her problem.

foss.in day 1

Today’s the first day of foss.in/2005 and I actually managed to wake up early. When I reached the venue, I saw a looooong queue of people waiting to get into the place. It seems there was a power outage and because of that, they couldn’t do

Sify trouble

I have been happily using Sify Broadband for many months now. Today, they made some changes to their setup, and boom! no more Sify access for me. All that the client says is a “Internal error. Unable to parse the XML.” I called them up and they asked me to

Conversation in the cab

“Yahoo is like Dravid.” “Google is like Dhoni.” “Microsoft is like Ganguly.”

LinCDs

Continuing the nostalgia, here are pictures of the LinCDs.com shirts that Yashwanth (it was his idea) and myself wore at LB/2003. The LinCDs.com name is a bit worn off now. Those numbers you see below the name is the version numbers that we had at that time.

PESIT FOSS Day

Last Thursday (24th November, 2005), there was a FOSS Day at PESIT, my alma mater. Typically, I managed to leave office and reach PESIT at 4.10 when I was supposed to be there at 4. The venue had shifted from the hall in the “new” building to the MCA

It’s a small utility

When Atul commented about open source being “seen as some kind of ‘hobbyist’ thing” in India, I was reminded of another incident in college. In 6th semester of VTU B.E., we had a DBMS (Database Management Systems) lab. We were supposed to write some software that demonstrates database design,

It doesn’t pay to be honest

Manjunath Shanmugham, an IIM Lucknow graduate, was recently murdered in Uttar Pradesh for trying to expose corrupt petrol pump owners. I am really speechless. Sharad expresses how I feel right now: In today’s world, where do you see this kind of courage and bravery – To say no to someone

REBIEX

Parshu (a colleague in Y! Bangalore) is presenting a session on REBIEX: Record Boundary Identification and Extraction Through Pattern Mining at the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, New York.

More Conversations

Apparently, Doug Kaye and Team ITC were not satisfied with ITConversations and now they’re onto an even grander vision. I say more power to them!

Memories of Linux Bangalore 2003

The VTU letter exhorting principals to motivate students to attend foss.in is a far cry from my college days, and perhaps even farther from Kalyan’s days. I remember asking our department’s Assistant HOD (I don’t remember his exact designation) whether our semester laboratory internals tests could

Potholed?

Have you been potholed in Bangalore lately? Yes, the question is supposed to be ironic. Go ahead and report it at BangalorePothole.com.

Uncaffeinated

The doctor has ordered me to not have coffee any more, as a precaution. This is so not fair. It’s not like smoking, ya know?

13 Virtues

Merlin talks about Benjamin Franklin and the 13 virtues he rigorously pursued with just a small note book. It’s amazing how Benjamin chose these 13 virtues and that too in that order. More so, on how he cultivated this habitude.

What a wonderful code

When a friend told me to listen to the song “What a wonderful world” by Louis Armstrong, I ended up changing the lyrics from: I see trees of green, red roses too I see them bloom for me and you And I think to myself what a wonderful world. I

Sunset

![61309967][]

Concepts

I finally got around to reading Stroustrup’s “The design of C++0x”, and was impressed by Stroustrup’s sense of language design, especially the clarity of thought with which he presents the topics. I still haven’t understood the part about “concepts” though. I wonder how it is different

Internet Business Models

A while ago, I was trying to explain internet business models to a couple of friends of mine, who are part of the brick-and-mortar business world. Some of the points I tried conveying are: What makes internet business models work is economy of scale – the more customers you have, the

Thrissur again

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

Richie blog rich

My blog is worth $32,178.78. How much is your blog worth?

Speaking of foss.in…

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!

Agriculture in India

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

Lisp Bazaar

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

A Podsafe CD

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

Another Sunday, Another Trek

![53435091][Small][Medium] This time it was Madhugiri Hill.

The Vortal

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.

Thought for the day

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

Gaim for some Google Talk?

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

Maths or Science or… ?

Eugene has an interesting discussion on what students should concentrate on for a career in Computer Science. Yesterday, our department hosted a “preview day” for high school seniors who are considering majoring in computer science here at UNI. During the question-and-answer portion of one session, a student asked, “What courses

YPodcast

Podcasts.Yahoo.com went live today. It’ll help you find and listen to podcasts as well as create your own podcasts. Many of my friends in Bangalore are part of the team that created this. Kudos to them for converting a concept to a product launch in an amazing

The Louvre

Eric Rougier has a wonderful 3D pic of the Louvre museum in Paris (Quicktime required). You might have read about the Louvre in The Da Vinci Code. Eric has a mind-blowing Panorama section that I check out from time to time. Paris is truly the City of Lights.

Parkinson’s Law

Lisa’s post on ‘Commit to a Breakthrough’ reminded me of Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Will the real IIPM please stand up?

Gaurav Sabnis has got a legal threat from IIPM for blogging negatively about the IIPM institute. Details at DesiPundit. I really wonder about the credibility of this institute. How can they teach management to students when they themselves don’t know how to manage criticism? Similarly, Mediaah was shut down

A R Rahman Concert

The A R Rahman New Dimensional Tour came to Bangalore yesterday. ![50721766][Small][] ![50721704][Small][] It rained heavily causing the show to start late by 2 hours. Sivamani played a small display of his amazing drums capabilities that kept the crowd satisfied till Rahman entered the stage. When the show

Mano Murthy did it again

It’s been 5 days since I saw the movie, but the title song of Amrithadhare is still playing on and on in my head. As far as I’m concerned, it’s going to be one of those classic songs. Nee amrithadhare KoTi janma jothe gaathi Nee amrithadhare Ihaku

Any webdevs interested to work for Yahoo?

My team is looking for web developers who can work on a contract basis for 3-6 months. Knowledge of PHP, Perl, Apache, FreeBSD(or Linux) is required. If anybody you know is interested, please ask them to send their resume to me ASAP.

Logical art

* Rands in Repose has written a thoughtful article “Signs of Art” where he asks “Is software art”? I think I’ll answer “Hell yeah”. * Jason says: The most important thing in software development is motivation. Motivation is local — if you aren’t motivated by what you are working on

Yahoo! Bangalore turns 5

Happy Birthday to Yahoo! Bangalore!

Pen and Paper

Excerpt from a messenger conversation: Me: Why is it that I think best only with a pen and paper… Pradeep: That way, your speed of thinking is inline with your natural speed Me: What? Pradeep: Hmm. Think about it :-P Me: Okay, let me grab a pen and paper… Pradeep:

Willison has entered the building

Simon Willison has joined Yahoo! This is exciting. For those who don’t know Willison, it’s sufficient to say that every web developer in this world should be forced to read Willison’s blog to become better designers. To jog your memory even more, he is one of the

Getting off the chair

Over 300 close family and friends in your home on one day + followed by Ramanagaram trek on Saturday + Savandurga trek on Sunday => me happy Ramanagaram ![44640711][small][] ![44640924][small][] ![44643060][small][] ![44645132][small][] ![44656573][small][] ![44660547][small][] ![44662949][small][] ![44663124][small][] Savandurga ![44626245][small][] ![44627195][small][] ![44627312][small][] ![44628839][small]

Sampada

Nadig and others have started Sampada – a site for all things Kannada. It has taken off really well in a short period. There are Kannada-related articles, blogs, discussions, book reviews, a learning center and any thing you would like to contribute!

perl -c life

From the perl.perl6.language newsgroup: Dave Rolsky wrote: Hurry up and finish.  I want to use this language, darnit!  And yes, I know about pugs, obviously, but for production usage I need less of a moving target ;) Larry Wall wrote: Yes, Perl 6 is a moving target–but one

Three portals you should know about…

… in case you already didn’t know: * Project Gutenberg * MIT OpenCourseWare * Wikibooks

The Time Thieves

Good article on The Time Thieves by Dr. Donald E. Wetmore. (via LifeHack).

The shortest interview possible

Anush “interviews” me. P.S. No, I did not select that photo.

Independence Day celebrations at Parikrma

This is a “photocast” of the Independence Day celebrations at the Parikrma Jayanagar school. ![34204132][Small][photo] ![34204357][Small][photo] ![34204444][Small][photo] ![34204589][Small][photo] ![34204768][Small][photo] ![34205021][Small][photo] ![34205084][Small][photo] ![34205461][Small][photo] ![34205999][Small][photo] ![34206492][Small][photo] ![34206578][Small][photo] ![34207206][Small][photo]

Happy Independence Day

![33359516][Medium][] Read about the Indian independence movement on Wikipedia. Update: The  Presidential address.

Care to share… The Parikrma Way

There’s an article on Parikrma in The Hindu. My favorite Parikrma poster is about atoms. Atoms are recycled in this universe, as you probably know. Potentially, we could have atoms that once belonged to Einstein or Mozart. The Parikrma volunteers believe these underserved children have the same potential as

Aamir Khan’s blog

Aamir Khan is blogging as Mangal Pandey? Somebody pinch me, I still can’t believe it. Is this for real? (via Mekin) Update: Scoble confirms it is authentic.

Y! Bangalore Showcase 2005

We had a “Y! Bangalore Showcase 2005” on Friday, August 5th, 2005. It was an internal showcase where all the teams and groups have the chance to showcase their projects and interact and brainstorm ideas on how they can collaborate and use each others’ expertise. For more than a week,

Statistics

A Bray-style statistics of the software used by the visitors of my blog: * Browsers * 38.89% use Firefox * 28.63% use Internet Explorer * 7.33% use Mozilla or Mozilla-compatible agents * 3.13% use Safari * Rest is miscellaneous and bots. * Operating System * 58.45% use Windows * 20.35% use unknown (!) * 13.

My new time management strategy

Don’t wear a watch.

Prabhakar Raghavan’s interview

Anush talks about an interview with Prabhakar Raghavan. Note that Prabhakar heads the Yahoo! Research efforts and is not the CTO.

That Podcast Song

I’ll blame Adam Curry for getting me addicted to that podcast song. Just can’t get the tune out of my head. My favorite part of the lyrics is: You want it, you got it…just download it and pod it On a podcast…no one’s gonna stop

Python at CodeZoo

OReilly’s CodeZoo has started a Python category at python.codezoo.com. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s used by the Python community, considering we have cheeseshop.python.org. However, CodeZoo provides a direct download option which is a plus point. It also has other features like

Insightful books about Computing

Banker asked me whether “you know of any good IT bios, or books related to gaming or animation or coding that are interesting enough to a layperson”. So, I came up with: * Hackers and Painters * Sampler: Why smart people have bad ideas * Joel on Software, the book * Sampler: Hitting the

Y, A and G

There’s an article in the Times of India today on the presence of the Y, A and G companies in Bangalore: (Click on the image to view it in full size) It’s nice to see the media showing that cool stuff does get done in Bangalore. As you

Broadband

I heard that Reliance InfoComm is offering broadband connections of 128 K speed, 10 GB limit for Rs 750 per month.  Has anybody else heard/tried this? That’s heck of a lot better than the 1 GB limit that I have with Sify right now. There have been too

Podcast Awards

PodcastAwards is a neat site to find good podcasts. Maybe I’ll vote for CoverVille. I’m also downloading some podcasts that play podsafe Jazz music. It’s funny how podcasting is such a great brand word that is helping Apple even though it isn’t specific to iPods. After

Tiger Dictionary

Just discovered a new shortcut for the Dictionary in Mac OS X Tiger – Press Cmd-Ctrl-D and voila, it shows the meanings of the selected word in my browser! P.S. In case you are wondering, I’m reading the RSS feed for Sepia Mutiny. Update: The shortcut works everywhere, not

The other parking problem

Well, if you thought the ycantpark photo pool was funny, this one’s even funnier: (from an IM conversation) (12:12:20) Kapil: yesterday we were discussing about the population explosion at y! Bangalore. here is the proof:  I cant get a ip for my pbook coz all the ips

360 API

Siddharth Uppal asked about a REST API for Yahoo! 360° and it seems that it is in the works.

Where are the Indian IT women bloggers?

…. asks Vijayalaxmi in The Telegraph newspaper. Excerpt: Unfortunately, figures on the number of women who blog in India are simply not available. But anecdotal evidence suggests that women write about personal or social issues, unlike men who focus on work-related issues. For instance, there are more chances of a male

Street Harassment

This is one of those things that nobody is willing to talk about, but something has to be done about it. Jasmeen Patheja has started the Blank Noise project to address street harassment, commonly known as eve teasing. More information is in this Deccan Herald article. If you think eve

Move over, Rails?

Django is here.

LB2005

Preparations for this year’s FLOSS meet in Bangalore is well under way. The working title is still LB2005  (Linux/Bangalore 2005) but the name will be changed to something more suitable. As Chitnis mentions, the idea is to promote FLOSS in general, including FLOSS on Windows and proprietary software

What about software patents in India?

The open source community is rejoicing ever since Europe rejected software patents … which leads me to the question, what’s the situation in India? I came across the following pages: * ArsTechnica on “India rejects software patents” * Stallman speaking at Government Model Engineering College * CPI(M) on Patents So, India does

Obsession session

Note: Pictures, courtesy of the community at Flickr. All rights reserved by the respective owners.

Italian Bytes of Python

The Italian translation of my book ‘A Byte of Python’ is now available online at http://www.gentoo.it/Programmazione/byteofpython. Thanks to Enrico Morelli and Massimo Lucci for volunteering this translation :) More info about them: Massimo Lucci and Enrico Morelli, we are working at the University of Florence (Italy)

Want to know what India is talking about?

Read Amit Varma’s latest blog mela.

It’s been a year

On July 1st of 2004 i.e. last year, I turned from an intern to a full-time employee at Yahoo!. Wait a minute, one whole year is already over! OMG! Hmm. A while ago, there was an internal discussion on why people have worked at Y! for years and years

Where’s Aathitude?

Avinash was very busy in the past weeks and was all excited the past couple of days. Why? Yahoo! Map API was released and he worked on it. He’s also written a neat demo for it. The finale before the release was quite interesting… because Google also released its

When geeks rap ….

… you end up with this: My flow is so intense that I will overflow your buffer, Corrupt your stack pointer makin’ all your data suffer. I’ve got saturated edges but your flow is sparser, Real gangstas sip on Yacc; instead you generate a parser. While you’re busy poppin’

The Podcast experience

For the uninitiated, podcasting is like a radio show that you regularly subscribe to, the podcasting software that you use downloads the mp3s of the show for you so that you can listen to it whenever/wherever you like. The difference is that anybody can start a radio show and

Crouching Tiger Hidden Productivity

Introduction I’ve been using Apple’s Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on my Apple PowerBook since nearly a month now….. I can’t help but think “this is how computers should be”. I’m trying to understand and jot down my thoughts on why it has made me

UnderestimatedTwiki

TWiki must be one of the most underestimated tools out there. We use it quite extensively at Yahoo!. What is TWiki? Officially, it is a “Enterprise Collaboration Platform” (yawn). What that means is that it is a wiki software that is meant to be used for intranet information. I’ve

Firefox has become cranky?

Is anybody else experiencing frequent Firefox crashes after upgrading to 1.0.4 ? 0.9 to 1.0.2 were rock solid. I wonder what’s up with this latest version.

Ode to the Moonwalker

So, Jacko might leave America… he is no longer popular or admired but he’s still the King of Pop music. So, I wrote this following so-called ode on a whim. It’s up to you to decide what to make of it….. MJ has become a ghost of himself

Book Tagged

Both Vignesh and JD have book-tagged me, so I am obliged to present to the world my choice of books… hmm… so here goes… Total number of books I own : Around 30 techie books and 10 general books. Most of the time, I borrow books from the Eloor Library, so

How do you attain self-discipline?

The five pillars of self-discipline are: * Acceptance * Will power * Hard work * Industry * Persistence Pavlina is going to start a series of posts on ‘the meaning of life’ from the day after tomorrow. Also, those 5 pillars can be remembered as “A WHIP”. It sure helped me whip myself to shape

An OS in the browser

Somebody in the internal lists pointed out to this – A whole Unix-like OS that runs in your browser. That is just incredibly crazy. Try vi. It works.

Ajax experts wanted

Yahoo! Bangalore is looking for companies in Bangalore who can do DHTML and Ajax (for contractual work) or even experts who can be hired. Please let me know if you have any recommendations.

Sleuth

Today evening, I watched the ‘Sleuth’ drama by ACTor theatre and directed by Pawan Kumar. The play has an interesting story and takes a lot of turns and twists. It even has a cheeky sense of humour that’s just about right. As Times of India mentions in Page 2

The Army is here

It has arrived! ![18542188][Medium][] Ashok Banker has autographed it and has written a brief message for me :mrgreen: Come to think of it… I might be the first person in India (other than Ashok himself) to have this book, since it is slated to be released on 16th June!

The Second coming of Steve Jobs

I had been to the library to look for a copy of Lee Iacocca’s autobiography, but all the copies had gone out. Then, I chanced upon this book called The Second coming of Steve Jobs in the same section. Honestly, how could I resist that? The timing couldn’t

Chiliablog and Softies

Interestingly, Sriram just made the 1,000th comment on my blog. Btw, Sriram joined Microsoft last month (in Hyderabad) as a PM in the DevTools team. To Sriram : blogs.msdn.com/sriramk doesn’t seem to be taken yet ;)

Language matters

Mulayam Singh Yadav says that English is the “the language of destruction, which has had a telling impact on the economy of India”. It actually reminded me of an incident a few years ago. My family and myself were on a trip (somewhere in Karnataka, I don’t remember the

State of Fear

I read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear last week. The story starts regarding George Morton, a millionaire philanthropist who supports the National Environmental Resource Fund and other such organizations … then a series of strange events happen with a racy pace. It even includes a trip to Antarctica. At the

Creativity

I was reading Eugene’s explanation about “small c” and “big C” creativity as used by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. To some degree, we all are creative in the small-c way, doing things that enrich our own lives but do not receive recognition from the outside world. Big-c creativity is different — it

Python Jobs

This is a sort of a deja vu thought but I’m going to write it anyway. There seems to be quite a hunt for Python guys in India, especially Bangalore. Jace’s client Partecs is looking for people who want to work on Python, Zope, Plone, Javascript, XHTML, CSS,

Reason 82 to blog

I’ll soon be getting an autographed copy of ‘Armies of Hanuman’ from Ashok Banker! Woohoo! That book isn’t in available in India yet :D P.S. I’ll write about the other 81 reasons later… ;)

GMail is trying too hard

This is the first time ever that I’m seeing such a mailer daemon error: Mail Delivery Subsystem to me This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: fink-beginners @ lists.sourceforge.net Technical details of permanent failure: TEMP_FAILURE: Too many connections to

What is a blog?

Some of my friends, who are uninitiated to the blogosphere, know that I write a ‘blog’ but they still don’t get what it really means. I’ve achieved some success by helping them understand how to use Firefox Live Bookmarks but I am sure there must be a lot

SQL and XML are not that different

About a year ago, I had presented my 8th semester presentation on Xen, now called C Omega. It is a language that combines SQL, XML and OOP into one tight language. The paper that proposed this language was named Programming with Circles, Triangles and Rectangles. The circle represents the encapsulation

Connect the text

A while ago I was thinking about using a wiki to organize my notes, but I don’t know if even that scenario would be useful for quick note taking because of the conversion from wiki syntax to HTML everytime which causes a lag when saving the notes. I have

Do you want to Yahoo! ?

I have completed nearly one year and one month as a Yahoo i.e. including my internship. I even have a blog post on that on the day I joined. It’s hard to remember that just one year ago I was just a college kid. Just one year ago,

Everybody’s a salesman

If you believe Paul Graham when he says that hiring is obsolete, then you should read the ten commandments for entrepreneurs by Alan Morgan. It just reinforces the fact that everybody’s a salesman. Update : Paul Graham’s full essay is online now

Messenger Bot

Eva is an online assistant bot that you can access using Yahoo! Messenger. ![12232641][Medium][photo] It has functionality to help you with dictionary meanings, exchange rate, flight info, phone info, reminders, stock quote, thesaurus, time of any place, weather of any place, as well as feedback to the person

Faith and Life

Last weekend, I had been on a pilgrimage with my family to Rameswaram. I have heard that Rameswaram is supposedly the biggest temple in India, although I haven’t been able to confirm that. The highlight of the pilgrimage was that we had to take bath in, or rather poured

A policeman in the office

It was around 6 o’ clock in the evening. I’m in the office. I went near the printer to collect some printouts. In the nearby library section, I notice a policeman! Gathered around the table was also Raju (the Man Friday of Y! Blr) and three Americans visiting from

Sadists

I was reading this article on Ten Reasons you’re a software developer (via   Vikram) and saw this sentence in point number 4: Software developers are artists, using crude tools to render images, text, and logic on electronic palettes that transcend aesthetic appeal. It reminded me of an old messenger

G4Swaroop

A close friend of mine had been to the US for work in his company’s headquarters. I had asked him to get me a laptop and I’ve been playing with it since the night before yesterday. What kind of laptop? It is a 12-inch Apple Powerbook with Mac

Prince of Reviews

I had written about the book ‘Prince of Ayodhya’ a few months ago.. it turns out that it is the featured review for the official EpicIndia website :-) Ashok Banker has already started to write the 9 books in the Mahabharata series and has an exclusive excerpt on his blog.

Mysore Moments

Two weeks ago (Apr 9-10), I had been to Mysore with family.. I was going through the pictures and many of them have come out really well. I just had to note some of the memorable moments: ![9387789][Small][photo] ![9387930][Small][photo] ![9388108][Small][photo] ![9388370][Small][photo] ![9388476]

The beat goes on

Yahoo’s First-Quarter Profit doubles! In the same announcement, you’ll notice this: In a bid for even more traffic, Yahoo plans to introduce a new digital music store later this year. In an interview Tuesday, Semel declined to provide details, but indicated it would include features that will compete

Zero Minus Ten

“Zero Minus Ten” is a James Bond novel written by Raymond Benson. The novel is a typical James-Bond story and I expected it to be one. Fancy gadgets from Q? Check. Talk to M? Check. Gorgeous women? Check. Trip round the world? Check.  And so on, but the novel is

Moved to TextDrive

After much thought, I am switching over to TextDrive  for my websites. The facilities at TextDrive are simply fabulous – from top-notch hardware to software such as Subversion, Ruby on Rails, and Python CGI; and best of all, an excellent bunch of hard-working guys there along with a vibrant community. Of

Do you really need the MBA?

This one’s for all the I’ll-do-CompSci-then-MBA-and-become-a-manager-in-a-software-company types. From Eric Sink on “Geeks Rule and MBAs Drool”: The following is an example of one of the most common questions I get from developers who are creating a brand new software company: Where can I find a partner to be

Need a Loan?

I’ve been bedridden since the past two days due to bad health. I’ve been struggling and swallowing lots of tablets. Then, I get a call on my mobile and I say Hello. He says “Mr. Swaroop, I’m from City Finance. Do you need a loan?” Now, how

Yahoo! Notepad as Wiki ?

I’m a big fan of Yahoo! Notepad, so here’s an idea to improve it  :-) I always like to write down stuff because it helps me to be a bit more organized and helps me make sure that I don’t forget something. So, I end up using

Wikipedia gets help from Yahoo!

The announcement is finally out (ok ok, in blogosphere terms, I am late but still…), Yahoo! is dedicating hardware and providing resources for Wikipedia. They’re also providing details fetched from Wikipedia when you search for cities, etc. in the international Y! search portals. Looks like they really were listening

Mark down my email

Here’s my weird-but-yet-interesting idea of the day… In most mailing lists (including non-geeky ones), HTML mail is usually discouraged but the newbies still want to make use of bold and italics and the rest. So, here’s my simple solution: Allow the user to use a rich text box

Paper planes

Ever have the feeling that you don’t have control of things? I compare it to lots of paper planes flying around you. You observe the whooshing sounds, you observe the patterns of flight, but you can’t concentrate enough to count how many planes there are or even the

The Apple bites back

The webosphere is all about design and aesthetics these days, which is of course, just what the doctor ordered and mainly thanks to Google and Apple (yes, I know you were waiting for me to say that). And when Paul Graham says we are now witnessing the return of the

Circle is open now

Yahoo! 360° is now open for a public beta. This photo is by Ernie, one of the Yahoos who has worked on 360° ; that 360° logo was created out of pixel blocks (whatever that means). Leave a comment (with a valid email address) if you need an invite. P.S.

Playing with Picasa

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

A Heap of Broken Images

On a tip-off from Anita, I had come to know about Girish Karnad’s play ‘A Heap of Broken Images’ at the Ranga Shankara theatre. I just came back from the theatre. I have to mention that I have never been to a real live play before (other than skits

Ponder

From Adam Bosworth on ‘Tensions on the web’: Indeed, every year in August, I vanish for a month from the web, turn off email, and deal with the withdrawal and suddenly I relearn how to think and concentrate. In a world where knowledge and thinking is everything, it is ironic

How to kill an open source project…

… by hiring the top guy into your company and then cut off all incentives for the community to get interested. Yes, I’m talking about IronPython and in this case, the company happens to be MS. Read what Edd Dumbill has to say about it, especially this part: Third-party patches

Yahoo! Groups gets a facelift

I opened up Yahoo! Groups and I see that it has got a new look. I really hate the choice of colors – light blue really doesn’t cut it for me – I can’t figure out how to change that in the settings. The ‘Management’ section for moderators is really

All about PyCon05

The three days of PyCon 2005 has just ended and am trying to read about all the events. There’s a surprising amount of info out there, thanks to blogs. This also makes me wince since I feel like I’ve missed sooo much! Don’t miss these: * The PyCon

How to spell my name

This was generated from Flickr photos using metaatem.net/words . The cool things you can do with web services… Sidebar: Wanna ipod your photo?

GMail out of beta soon?

Charlene Li (of Forrester Research) claims that Y! Mail has upped the storage to 1 GB to match GMail and combining that observation with the recent increase of invites count to 50 for all GMail users, it is a sign that GMail is soon coming out of beta! Holy smokes,

Search for the Commons

You can now search for Creative Commons-licensed content using Yahoo! Search at search.yahoo.com/cc! If  you did not know already, Creative Commons is a nonprofit that offers a flexible copyright for creative work. Basically, if you made a creative work of art such as images/photography, audio/music,

Reading H2G2

Yeah,  I’m finally reading Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m reading the “Four parts of a trilogy” all-in-one book…. finished part 1 and part 2 (“The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”) and now reading part 3 “Life, the Universe and Everything”

Thout Bytes

OSoft, Inc. have released my book ‘A Byte of Python’ in Thout format. There are two aspects of Thout – one is that the Thout format is based on XHTML and second, the Thout reader software (similar to Windows .chm Help Viewer) is available for all the major platforms. I am

iPod!

My manager went to our Sunnyvale office recently and came back today. I had asked him to get an iPod Mini for me… when he gave it to me in the morning, I was grinning away to glory. I am not much of a gadget guy, but I was craving

So why not a blog mela

I’m trying to play catch up with the blogosphere.. but it is difficult when I have 221 feeds in Bloglines. Actually, there were more but I’m trying to trim down my folders to a more manageable size. I got bored of simply reading, so I decided to host

GCC and the ABI

From the Autopackage Developer Quickstart: Important note to C++ developers If your software uses Qt/kdelibs, or just rely on many (large) C++ libraries, then you must be careful. This is because of C++ ABI (Application Binary Interface) issues: GCC 3.4 broke C++ ABI (again), so software compiled with

Yahoo 360!

It’s official. Yahoo! has entered the blogosphere. Soon, you’ll be blogging at 360.Yahoo.com :D . The integration is simply awesome. Having played with it, I think Blogger.com will face some real competition now.

Bazaar-NG

Canonical, the guys behind Ubuntu Linux, seem to be creating a “next-generation distributed version control system” called Bazaar-NG. It’s written in Python and is primarily tested on Ubuntu. I haven’t played with it but it seems it is already self-hosting, that demonstrates a bit of its capabilities. They

Ruby-India First Meetup

Today was the first meetup of the Ruby-India group (I wanted to announce this on my blog yesterday but the net connection was down at home :|,  all hail Sify). I wanted to attend the intro Ruby talk basically because Premshree yaks about Ruby so much, I realized it was better

Walk the tree

In the second round of Google India Code Jam 2005, there were 3 problems to be solved in 1 hour. The first question was easy. The second question was also kind of easy, but I mucked up due to bad handling of corner cases, however I finally managed to get

Overtime

I still can’t stop laughing at this: (IRC chat room) Ben174 : If they only realized 90% of the overtime they pay me is only cause i  like staying here playing with Kazaa when the bandwidth picks up after hours. ChrisLMB : If any of my employees did that they’d

Tautologies are overrated

[code] $ python2.4 True,False = False, True True False False True a = True if a: …     print ‘Hello World’ … if not a: …     print ‘Hello World’ … Hello World [/code] I am a big-time Python fan but this is crazy! (discovered via python-list)

The Job Spool

Today, I got a job offer in my inbox from … err, let’s just say a well known company. They say some quite interesting things like "We have received your profile through one of our employees and find that it matches some of the openings we have with us. These

Gymmitment

I’ve finally made it to day 3 of gym. If my ‘gymmitment’ makes it through 7 days, then I think I’ll be regular and get back in shape. I want to regain the fitness I had exactly a year ago. I thought it was a funny coincidence that

Indian Music Online

Most music sites will work only on Windows and that too specifically IE – so I was glad to see that MusicIndiaOnline now works on Linux using the RealOne Player. Their FAQ answers about  how to get it to work on Linux. Btw, I really like this album by Om – The

Yahoo! is a 10 year old kid

Yesterday was Yahoo!’s 10th birthday party and has officially completed 10 years today :D .. 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

Yahoo! Search Python API Howto

I guess most of you would’ve heard the announcement by now that a Yahoo! Search Developer Network a.k.a. YSDN has been started. The idea is to build a community around Yahoo! Search by opening up search webservices (with documentation) along with mailing lists, a blog and even

Gopal

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

Code Jammin’

I just did the Google Code Jam thing. This was the first time ever that I used TopCoder, so I had to spend the first ten minutes just trying to figure out the interface. The first problem for 300 points was something to do with decibels. I took heck of

Renaissance 2005

Travel 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

Journey to Trichur

I am giving a talk on Python tomorrow at the  Renaissance 2005 festival at Government Engineering College, Trichur, Kerala, India. Renaissance 2005 is a festival about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) – they have many talks, seminars and competitions planned for the 3 days. As they say in their website:

Politics, anyone?

Rashmi Bansal asks why the so-called ‘NextGen’ youth Indian politicians haven’t made any impact so far. Let me hazard a guess: Because the oldies haven’t given them a chance to actually accomplish something. I imagine the situation to be like this: Young neta goes to old neta and

The Art of Blogging

Want to know how to write a great blog? Here’s how.

Coming soon : Learn Python in German!

Lutz Horn, Bernd Hengelein and Christoph Zwerschke have volunteered and started to translate my Python beginner’s book to German! The project is hosted at developer.berlios.de/projects/abop-german. If you know Python and German, you’re most certainly welcome to join the translation as well. You can start

Learn Python in Chinese!!

Juan Shen has translated my beginner’s book on Python ‘A Byte of Python’ to Simplified Chinese!  Juan Shen is postgraduate at Wireless Telecommunication Graduate School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China PR. You can read the Chinese version online right now. More details about Juan Shen and his efforts to

BangPypers meet on Saturday

If you live in Bangalore (or happen to be in Bangalore the day after tomorrow) and want to learn about the Python programming language, join us at the BangPypers meet on Saturday! Its going to be a fun day. What’s gonna happen? Here it is: What: Bangalore Python February

Is Open Source the solution?

Should Yahoo! open up its messenger protocol? Does Google really follow its ‘Do no evil’ philosophy? Should government and public data be allowed to be handled by proprietary software? Is open source the solution always? Is using non-freedom software detrimental? The big debate is here.

Prince of Ayodhya

I just finished reading the book ‘Prince of Ayodhya’, the first volume of a series of books which are a modern re-telling of the great Ramayana by Ashok Banker. The book is simply awesome. I was totally raptured by it and am still in awe of the story. I just

Lovaria epidemic

Today is Valentine’s Day but the crass commercialization sickens me. I don’t have a girlfriend but nonetheless I’ll still dedicate a song to whoever steps in to my life in future ;) This is ‘Beautiful Soul’ by Jesse McCartney : I don’t want another pretty face I don’

My Yahee!

Drop everything. Turn up the volume. See this flash video. I couldn’t stop laughing. Strangely, he reminds me of myself. ( Found via Yahoo! Search Blog )

Ask for Answers

I seem to be on a string of Google and Yahoo related posts lately, so here’s continuing the trend… Yahoo was asked about who coined the phrase ‘to coin a phrase’ Google answers about how to whistle Amazing what we can learn on the web…

Wikipedia to get Googlified?

I got to know from the grapevine that Google has offered hosting for Wikimedia projects. See the discussion page for user views and add your own thoughts if you like. In case, you already didn’t know, Wikipedia is a free excellent community-driven encyclopedia. It isn’t surprising that Wikipedia

Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox

The Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox (beta) is released! This is handy for me since I use Yahoo Mail, Calendar, AddressBook and Notepad a lot. Two features I liked are ‘Search only the current site’ and the bookmarks integration. The only downside is that it takes up a chunk of screen

A Blogful of Work

The blogosphere is full of news about Mark Jen getting fired from Google for blogging. Zawodny has the full scoop. The part that interested me the most is what Jeremy Cole had to say about it. I have been unknowingly following his three rules on what (and what not) to

Why I prefer KDE over GNOME

Praveen says that GNOME is better but I don’t think I will switch from KDE anytime soon. I know this is the start of a holy war, in spite of that, here is why I prefer KDE over GNOME : Lots of good applications – Kate, Konsole, Quanta Plus, K3B, KSysGuard,

It finally hit me why Mepis / Debian rocks

I switched to Mepis GNU/Linux on my office system today. Just one word – Beauuuu—ti—ful! I had earlier tried Mepis at home but had to switch back to Fedora Linux because of a stupid program provided by Sify Broadband, without which I cannot use the internet. Ironically, I

Google Maps

Have you seen the Google Maps! The UI is really cool. Left click, hold and drag the mouse, the map actually moves! Google keeps obliterating the assumption that the web is not about just HTML, dynamism is the in-thing. I am really surprised that others have not done such Web

GPLed Qt on Windows!

Yippee! Qt 4.0 will have a full GPLed edition for Windows! Imagine quickly writing awesome Qt apps and running it on Linux as well as Windows. Beautiful. Maybe this means we will soon have KDE running natively on Windows? Not that I would use it but that would be

Ask Jeeves buys Bloglines?

The news is that Ask Jeeves has bought Bloglines. I just hope it doesn’t become yet another good service that is bought by a big company and then goes downhill… Update : Russell Beattie echoes my sentiments as well. Update : It’s official! : Excerpt: "We want to assure you that

Redesigned my book website

I have redesigned ByteOfPython.info and now have a nice and clean theme based on Negen. The theme had the right combination of the two things I look for : simple and attractive. I usually like to hack up a theme myself just like I did for my blog, but this

Bangalore Pythonistas list is high traffic!

The BangPypers group was created just 10 days ago. There has already been 202 messages by 44 members! Just goes to show that Python is alive and kicking in Bangalore. BangPypers rule! Uhh.. I mean they sing well ;)

Interface it

Interfaces are now available in C++ … I really wonder – Do we need this? I am a beginner to the big bad world of C++ code but I don’t see what an interface would do in C++ that an abstract class can’t do… I guess its one of the

Japan now blogs on Yahoo!

Yahoo! Japan now has blogs. More at SearchEngineJournal.

AOP leads you to a good job?

I searched for aspect oriented programming on Google and it showed me an ad to join Google! Yet another demonstration of clever marketing by Google. Searching on Yahoo gave almost exact list of results (except for the job ad ;) ). Its amazing how the Yahoo search engine has caught up with

Aspect Oriented Programming and TreeCC

Programmers are always on a never-ending quest for proper design of software. One of the buzzwords in this area is aspect oriented programming. I have heard of AspectJ and other stuff before but never cared/understood enough to take a look at it. Recently, I came across the TreeCC program

Trek at Thusharagiri

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

Blogging from Calicut!

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,

Talk at FLOSS Meet tomorrow

There is a FLOSS Meet tomorrow at NIT Calicut, Kerala and I will be giving talk on Python along with Pradeep. The organizers informed me that around 100-150 students are expected. Also, apparently, today’s edition of  the New Indian Express features news about the event as well :) Other speakers

Code word Legal

I guess you must’ve already heard that OpenSolaris is now ‘open’ for business. So, Sun has open sourced Solaris. Sun expects a cheering community and welcoming of OpenSolaris with a lot of fanfare ; but (unsurprisingly?) they are getting a lot of flak over the ‘Common Development and Distribution License’

Soul and Role of Yahoo and Google

After quite a while, I was reading again, Battelle’s posts on Yahoo and Google and their role in media and technology . Its an interesting read. It got me thinking on how the cultures of Yahoo and Google are so different, yet they are so similar in what they do

PyCon

I just saw the PyCon 2005 schedule and the abstracts of the talks. Just one thing on my mind – I wish I could attend! The list of talks as well as of the speakers are simply amazing.

Deliciously popular!

This is cool – ‘A Byte of Python‘ is the most popular link for the python tag in del.icio.us! In fact, its been bookmarked by 53 people (as of now)! Thanks to Prem for telling me about it :) Update: Its bookmarked by 119 people as of now.

Snake charmer

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

Stories by Sudha Murty

I just read the book ‘How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories’, its a splendid collection of short stories by Sudha Murty. She has a very poignant yet subtle way of explaining things and I was smiling throughout each story :) One of my favorite stories is ‘I

First Bangalore Python meetup

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

My sister draws in GIMP

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you a scenery painting by my 7th standard sister Swathi using GIMP  !! :) Note that I’ve only taught her to use Linux and open GIMP, she learnt how to use GIMP by herself. I explained her the concept of ‘Undo’ – she says she’ll

Python meetup in Bangalore tomorrow

There’s a Python meetup at Ebony Restaurant, Bangalore tomorrow at 7.30 pm. Please do join if you are interested. Anand Pillai has taken up the initiative for the gathering. Details of the venue are as follows: Barton Center is a prominent building on M.G Road a few

Choose Python

I have printed this ‘Choose Python’ poster (by Tim Lesher) and proudly posted it in my cubicle. Oh, and as JD commented, I am brainwashing myself to say "Solutions matter. Don’t focus on anything else. Solutions matter." P.S. My Python category feed was added to PlanetPython. Thanks Ryan!

Evolution on Windows : The Cross Platform Holy Grail

Nat Friedman announced that Tor Lillqvist, of GTK+ on Windows fame, has joined Novell and will soon be working on a port of Evolution to Windows!! I am not particularly excited at the thought of using Evolution (I prefer Thunderbird) but I am excited because the effort that will be

The Road to Gandolfo

I just finished reading ‘The Road to Gandolfo’ by Robert Ludlum. As expected, Ludlum writes a brilliant story. Although the first half of the book is not that interesting, the latter half totally changes things around. The story is about General Mackenzie Hawkins, a living military legend and a veteran.

Why is the computer against me ?

Aargh!! I’m having one of those bad days… As it is, I’m having major problems with SQL in my work and have a tough time with that … On an unrelated note, I am trying to install a package and rpm throws up with an error: $ sudo rpm -qa

Will Yahoo buy Six Apart ?

The Internet Stock Blog predicts that within six months, Yahoo! will buy Six Apart – there are lot of valid arguments and I agree with most of them. Blogs are going to be the thing in 2005.  Well, if you are reading my blog, you know what it’s all about

Premshree joins Yahoo!

Premshree Pillai joined Yahoo! today. Welcome to the gang Premshree! If you didn’t know already, Premshree recently presented a talk on Ruby at Linux Bangalore/2004. You’ll also see many of his recipes in the Python Cookbook. To see his list of publications, see his CV.

Alex Speech

If you work in the software field, then you must read this speech by Alex Stepenov (Principal Scientist, Adobe Systems) at Adobe India on 30 Nov 2004. He doesn’t speak about any out-of-this-world concepts, but simple things that we should remember. It could be summarised as ‘Go back to

Snakes and stones

Well, I came across this blog post by ‘PragDave’ where he writes a quick Ruby script that extracts the latest 5 entries from an RSS feed, writes it to a file and FTPs it to a remote box. Seems simple enough but somehow the script just wasn’t readable to

Inspiration

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit." — Aristotle (Ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, 384 BC- 322) "When we started the band, it was because we were waiting for a sound that never happened. We got tired of waiting, and we decided to

The age of Folksonomy

Ever since del.icio.us and Flickr have become popular, Thomas Vander Vaal invented the term ‘Folksonomy’ and ever since, the concept has taken off. There’s even a paper presentation about it. So, when Technorati came up with tags, should we be surprised? However, the possibility is amazing. Suppose

Byte parts

I’ve been working on restructuring my book and split it into Part I – The Language and Part II – The Libraries. I am designing it such that readers can learn the language from Part I and be happy. Whenever they need to do more stuff such as GUI and databases

The Confluence Project

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.

SLYNUX

Do you consider yourself a geek who loves to use GNU/Linux? Do you think you are one of the true geeks around who knows how to hack at it ? Think again. There’s an article in ‘The Hindu’ about Sharath Lakshman who has developed his own customized distro called

Future of Programming is Functional Programming ?

I was reading this interesting article on ACM  Queue called Extensible Programming for the 21st Century –  the author talks about the current state of languages, compilers and libraries and then he proposes a solution to solve most of the problems – write programs in XML format! Before I pour my thinking

Byte of Python list is formally open

I am formally announcing the Byte of Python book mailing list. The first post is reproduced below for your convenience: Hello everyone! Welcome to the Byte-of-Python mailing list :)  Its exciting to write this first post! New version I just released version 1.20 of ‘A Byte of Python’ [1] and

Byte of Python revived

The 1.20 version of ‘A Byte of Python’ is finally out – this new release has been long overdue – more than 9 months since the last release. This is the revival of the snake charmer ;) This new version is a rewrite of the book and I’ve improved the explanations

Imagine a waiter’s life

Check out Waiter Rant – its all about the experiences of a waiter in a New York restaurant. The latest two stories are simply hilarious. Its a must-read.

Bloglines rules!

According to FeedBurner,  Bloglines owns one-third of the RSS market. All hail Bloglines! Bloglines is a website where you can subscribe to blogs and any RSS or Atom feed and when new stories are posted, you can read them from Bloglines. You won’t have to visit every website to

The Headless Mac is here

There have been a slew of announcements at the MacWorld 2005 Expo: * Mac Mini – Get a Mac workhorse for just 499$ but you have to  BYODKM i.e. Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard and Mouse. * IPod Shuffle – It doesn’t have a display but you still get to hear great

Python workshop at NIT Calicut

I’ve been invited to conduct a workshop on Python at NIT (formerly REC), Calicut, Kerala. It’ll be most probably on 29th of this month (date to be yet confirmed). I’m glad to tell you that Pradeep will be joining me – we’ll be conducting an on-hands session

The IndiBloggies

The 2004 IndiBloggies are here! – these awards are publicly-chosen awards conferred upon bloggers who showcase excellence in the Indian blogosphere. My attention was immediately caught by the extremely simple yet striking design of the site. Very well done by Chugs. I came across many interesting blogs in this list such

Guido on static typing in Python

I was just reading the latest brain dump by Guido on ‘Optional Static Typing in Python’ and various comments on it. First impression? I don’t like it. The simple reason being that it makes Python much more complex. I know its the same rant again but hear me out.

HTML Export feature for WordPress

Here’s an idea I thought of today. I’ve been using WordPress 1.5 beta to maintain a worklog and I came across a situation today where a ‘HTML export’ feature would have been useful. I basically wanted to send a detailed description of a problem to a colleague

A Rich Life

One of my favorite stories that I have read is as follows: One day a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of  showing his son how poor people live. They spent a couple of days and nights

LinkBlog

I have now added a linkblog sidebar on this blog. It is actually a cached version of my del.icio.us bookmarks maintained by the delicious-cached WordPress plugin. Some of the latest links I’ve added include Waiter Rant which is a humorous blog about the daily experiences of a

Comment spam sucks

Forgive me for the ironic title, but I am getting spammed non-stop by some adult sites. I checked my mail today morning and I see more than 228 new comments on my site!! I had to delete them all by hand. Aah, the pains of becoming popular ;) I immediately installed

Happy New Year 2005

Happy New Year to you :) May you live life to the fullest everyday.

Tsunami Relief Efforts

The Tsunami Relief efforts taken up by so many agencies and volunteers are heartening. On our part, Y! Bangalore employees have come together and organized a plan to help out… donations were collected from ourselves and I was happy to note we collected quite a good amount in such a

Kong is King

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you would’ve heard about how the Mozilla community started the SpreadFirefox initiative and about the full-page advertisement in a major daily newspaper in USA as well, and that all the marketing and funds were from the

Cycling vs biking

I thought my biking trip was radical but check out ShreeKumar who just completed a cycling trip from Chennai to Kolkata – over 2000 km on cycle in 15 days!!! He is either a total energy junkie or simply gone crazy ;) He has promised complete details once he gets back to

Knoppix Rules

Knoppix is one of the coolest Linux distros around, especially because of its amazing hardware recognition capabilities. To have a full operating system running just from a CD without the need for even a hard disk was simply unimaginable to me before I learnt about Knoppix. I was simply blown

Category Specific Feeds

I’ve been blogging a lot more since the last couple of months and I have phased from a tech-only blog to a real ‘Life and Technology’ blog which has been my tagline ever since I started blogging. So, the good news is that I finally figured out how to

About The Dreamer

As you might have noticed, I have changed the title of my blog to a new name ‘The Dreamer’ from ‘Dynamically Typed’. There are 2 reasons (yes, there had to be 2, after all I am The G2 for a new name: I’ve been blogging on and off over

Joke Falls

I saw Joke Falls a few days ago and I was surprised to see a well made Kannada movie after sooooooooooo long (no exaggeration that). Ironically, it is a hit movie and inspired from an old Dharmendra movie ‘Chupke Chupke’ whereas the hit movie Swades is inspired (strictly in my

Tsunami hits South and South East Asia

Nearly 9000 people have died in India, Thailand, Indonesia, Maldives and Sri Lanka due to a massive tsunami triggered by the largest earthquake the Earth has seen in the past 40 years. I was watching NDTV News and I was totally frightened about the extent of the tragedy and they

Biking to Green Valley

Update: Photos are now in Flickr. Yesterday night, me and my ol’ PESIT gang decided to go for a biking trip today to GreenValley. The decision all happened quickly and we just decided to go there, not knowing what we were actually going to see there. Green Valley is about

I want to go gadling too

One of my favorite sites that I follow these days is Gadling.com. Webster dictionary says that ‘gadling’ means ‘a roving vagabond’. Nice. I recently came across an entry about FromParis.com which contains amazing panoramic photographs of Paris, the City of Lights. It is simply awesome. Whatever you do,

More Wikipedia

I’ve been using Wikipedia, WikiBooks and WikiQuote since quite a while and I am just amazed at the breadth and depth of their content. That too, this is a community effort done voluntarily in free time. Awesome. Simon Willison listed his favorite features recently. Take a look. You’ll

Reelity

When you have cousins flying over from Canada and Australia and everybody catches up, you tend to do stuff together. We went bowling and watched Musafir on Sunday.  The movie is worth watching just for Sanjay Dutt! He’s amazing.  My favorite dialogue of the movie is (in Hindi) "Taqdeer

Great movie after a great day

It was a good day for work. I worked non-stop in refactoring my project and cleaning up the code. So, I ended up the day by seeing "Ocean’s 12" at PVR Cinemas at Forum with my friend Azmi. The movie’s great. I liked the plot. There’s only

Wikipedia rocks

My 12-year old sister wanted to learn more about musical instruments for some homework that she wanted to write and asked me if I knew something to write about. I told her she could use the internet to read all about that. So, she logged into Fedora. I showed her

Dynamic Java

Good to hear that Sun is finally serious about dynamic languages on Java. It’s no secret that I don’t like Java. I don’t want to start a holy war here – it’s just simply my personal preference, I don’t like the ‘smell’ and ‘feel’ of it.

Galaxy of neck and heads

I’ve been down with fever since the past two days :( I watched a part of the ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ movie and one sentence really stood out for me: Men are the head but women are the neck. We can make the head turn any way we want.

Yahoo! Bangalore looking for good hackers

Yahoo! Bangalore is looking for good people to get involved in some cool projects from UI to the OS! If you are interested, send me a resume and I’ll forward to them to the right guys. Extra bonus points if you have attended my talk at LB ;) Heh heh.

Distro considerations

I was using MEPIS Linux for the past 4 days after a high recommendation by Pradeep and I was remarkably surprised by the ease of install. First of all, it acts as a LiveCD so you can test out everything before you do any install and then you then click

2004 Weblog Awards

Here you go, the 2004 Weblog Awards! Very cool! Has almost any kind of category you can imagine. It’ll take quite a while to go through the list of sites here, but I think there’s a lot of good stuff in there just waiting to be read :)

Now Reading: Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono

de Bono has always fascinated me… to write 56 books on ‘thinking’ is certainly no easy feat!! I wanted to read this book for quite some time and had got it yesterday from the Eloor library.. have started to read it…. I especially like the part which says: Being a

LB2004 Day 3

I woke up late today and so I missed half of Premshree’s talk on Ruby… :(  … I want to go through the slides when it will be available on the BLUG site. Surprisingly, Pradeep and Vinay too arrived just 5 min after me… not just our interests, but our timings

LB2004 Day 2

After my talk,  I managed to listen to Sirtaj talking about the future of KDE, especially KDE 4 , although I had missed the first part of his talk because I was talking to people who had listened to my talk and were asking me more about Python… Then, me and

Talking Python

I tried to get some work done yesterday but after a long day and me being the lazy guy that I am, I just went to sleep after getting back… I woke up today morning and started working on the slide and had a few more practical examples comparing some

LB2004 Day 1

Day 1 started with the inauguration of Linux Bangalore/2004 . LB doesn’t have the concept of chief guests, but the chief guest is the audience and so the representatives of various LUGs across India lighted the lamps, on behalf of the audience, to inaugurate the beginning of 3 days

Parties should be like this….

I got back on Saturday night from the Yahoo Year End Party and it was just way 2 cool… :) We had left from our office on Thursday night in 4 buses… about 120 people in total I guess … Having worked all night on the day before on this new blog

Yahoo YEP

We, the Yahoos, are leaving for MGM Beach Resort in Chennai tonight to celebrate our Year End Party tomorrow! Lot of things to look forward to – games, beach, skits, music, cocktails, disco, antakshari in the bus, lots of fun!! I’ll be back on Saturday night with lots to update

I’m talking at LB04

Yep, that’s right. I’ll be taking over the stage at LB04 to convert Perl/C++/Java programmers into Python programmers under an hour ;) The talk is titled ‘Python for Programmers’ and a short blurb follows: Python for Programmers This talk/tutorial is designed to introduce Python to experienced

LB 04 is just 5 days away!

Hari Krishnan  made this cool banner. Don’t forget to check out the list of talks/speakers ! Some of the ‘hot’ speakers are: Andi Kleen ( TCP/IP Stack in Linux, Linux x86-64, etc) Andrew Cowie (http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/AndrewCowie) Brian Behlendorf (Apache) Harald Welte ( Netfilter/IPTables, Linux Kernel

Coming back to life

In sync with my fave song of late – Pink Floyd’s "Coming back to Life" – this blog is back alive and kicking again :) Well, no, I hadn’t gone underground, it’s just that I’ve become too involved in stuff and now I’m slowly getting untangled and back

Scripting one-liners

I was going through some data files and I had a requirement to get the last character of each line to analyze the files… and so a discussion began between me and Kiran, a fellow yahoo and soon our blr devel group. I contributed a Perl and Python one-liner and

Interesting stuff in computing

I’ve come across a lot of interesting stuff in these past few days: * Position open to work on IronPython and dynamic languages on the CLR at Microsoft * Fedora Core 3 due for Nov 1 * Mozilla now available using Qt toolkit (in CVS) * A Matter of Inspiration – A Code Hero,

LINDEC 2004

Yesterday, I attended the LINDEC 2004 or "Linux Desktop Conference 2004" organized by gnomebangalore.org backed by Novell. The chief geek was none other than Nat Friedman. It’s interesting to note that the conference was held at PESIT, yep, my alma mater. We never had these kinda things w.

22nd over

Today’s my birthday! In cricket terms, it’s the 22nd over and I’m still batting strong!! :D Ha Ha!

Design process of Thunderbird Logo

How the Thunderbird logo was designed – this is such an eye candy page for sure. And the website design is also soooo cool.

Yahoo and Creative Commons

Here’s something you didn’t know about the Yahoo search engine before – you can search for Creative Commons licensed pages using it. Very interesting.

Internet Radio

I’m doing a late-nighter at work today… so I thought of listening to some music while doing the hackathon, but I’ve got bored of the ones on my hard disk. So, how about internet radio? Well, I switched to FC2 on my office box, so I can’t

Recursive searching

I thought I’d take some time out and read up on Python metaclasses, so I entered "python metaclasses" in the google (yeah, google) search bar in Firefox and pressed go and guess what I was looking at – my own blog post! :-O

Gloomy Weather

It’s such a gloomy weather here in Bangalore… sigh. It’s been raining cats and dogs and as a result I got cold, cough and fever… and I’m just recovering now. However, I did manage to read ‘Ignited Minds’ by Abdul Kalam over the weekend. All I can

Python – Metaclasses, Decorators and other funky stuff

I really have to learn about Python metaclasses! Here’s what I’m talking about: * Are decorators really that different from metaclasses.. * Proposal for removing self Before I forget, something which every Python user ( including me ;) ) should read: * General Python FAQ

Website reloaded!

So, I finally upload the new version of my website. It has taken a long time and I’ve stopped blogging quite some time ago as well. Now, my website and blog are "coming back to life"! I had originally planned to use WordPress, I had even hacked it up

IronPython is open source!!

IronPython has been released as open source!! Get it while it’s hot at IronPython.com !

Apache on-demand!

Want to use Apache, MySQL, PHP – the whole works? But don’t want to go through the pain of installation? Then XAMPP comes to your rescue! Just unzip and use! Is that cool or what?

The Future of PC ?

This is mind-blowing – is this the future of pc? -> Athens PC

Mullainagiri photos

Check out the snaps of my latest trip – trekking at Mullainagiri – the highest point in Karnataka!! I’ll add a writeup of it soon… I’ve been unable to update my blog much nowadays… but I am thinking of shifting my website to one of the popular open source CMSes

My book in a Microsoft magazine!

Here’s a paragraph from an article in the Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine Online: "To learn Python, I’d start with Core Python Programming by Wesley Chun. The online documentation and tutorial is also terrific. A great free tutorial called “A Byte of Python” is available at http://www.python.

The API War

Robert McLaws comments on Joel Splosky’s ‘Microsoft has lost the API War’ article.

Open source coming of age

Newsforge has a new article on ‘Open source cracks publishing wide open’ – It is an interesting article to which I can directly relate to. Yes, I am referring to my book. It is heartening to note that open source tools are coming of age and are being used in a

I got GMail!

Marcie Robillard was running a  contest where the most creative requests would get GMail invites! I sent one of my ‘dynamically typed’ poems praising her ;-0 …  but I was disappointed to not get any GMail Invites from Marcie. But when she got more GMail invites, she sent them to the

Yahoo! Mail is 100 MB!

Yahoo! Mail Free edition is upgraded to 100 MB now!! This rocks! The new interface however is just ok. I can now send attachments up to 10 MB. Read more about the new and improved Yahoo! Mail. This also means I won’t be using my Spymac 1 GB email

High on Kaffeine!

On a whim, I downloaded Xine and Kaffeine and installed them. One word sure comes to mind – Smooth!! There was absolutely no problems in installing them. A simple ‘./configure; make; sudo make install;‘ does the trick. One extremely pleasant thing I discovered was that Xine now plays .dat files – Sweet!

Eclipse without JVM

Red Hat makes Eclipse go native using GNU ClassPath project!

Discussion boards

I’ve set up a discussion board on my website to discuss things such as my book ‘A Byte of Python’ as well forums for PESIT students and alumni. I’d love to hear any suggestions on how these forums can be made popular or even new useful forums such

Blog review bytes

I came across Mark Mayo’s blog and he had some nice comments about my book.

Byte on CD!

‘A Byte of Python’ is being distributed on CDs accompanying the german ‘Linux Enterprise’ magazine!

Idea 2 Language

Eric Gunnerson explains how an idea becomes a C# language feature…. The C# 2.0 Specification has been been updated on generics, iterators, anonymous methods, partial classes and other miscellaneous features .

Waving to Venus

I am watching the transit of Venus across the Sun. Cool!

French Bytes

Gregory (coulix-at-ozforces-dot-com-dot-au) is planning to translate my book to French during his upcoming semester break. He is from New Caledonia (a small French island in the pacific) and is now studying Computer science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He says that translating the book will allow him to get

Sunday == Funday!

Yesterday was such a blast with all my friends! 8 of us travelling on 4 bikes leaving at 4.30 am to travel more than 110 km (one-way, total of 220 km for the day) to go see a mango grove!! We were woken up by each other through sms’

Latest Bytes

There have been more than 3273 pageviews in the last 5 days (02/06/2004-06/06/2004). The majority of readers are, in order, from net, com and edu domains, Australia, Germany, India, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, Finland, France, Netherlands, Austria, Japan, Brazil, Czech Republic, USA Military, Denmark, Poland,

Tech Tips

My book is the top Tech Tip in the ComputerWorld.com AppDev Center today! You can also access the story directly.

Open Source Java??

Sun is going to open source Java!! – now this is something really cool. The one thing that immediately comes to mind is that all Linux distributions can start distributing Java in the CDs itself and more software can be written utilising Java. So it’s a win-win situation for both

Contemplation

As Forrest Gump’s mom says “Life’s like a box of chocolates – you never know what you gonna get”… You want to find out right now but you just can’t yet… There’s always a mystery… about my future and my history… On what could be and what

C that Python!

Here’s something that’s really cool, a C Compiler written in Python! This is fascinating. I think it would be perfect for people like me who want to study a compiler – Reading Python code is a big bonus and it is a compiler for the C language which is

VTU == V Torture U

I just wrote the only paper in our last semester of B.E. – Cryptography and Network Security (CNS for short). It was a tough paper! The questions focused on small things such as Hill Cipher for 20 marks! And the others were questions where we were clueless. It’s not

Mono Beta 2 released!

Mono Beta 2 released! Wow, Miguel, Maurer, Pryor, Gonzalo, Kestner and the rest of the gang are really moving fast! Lots of improvements have been made especially the bug-fixing and performance enhancements. Can’t wait till 1.0! If only, it worked on FreeBSD – my only gripe yet :-(

DotGNU

DotGNU Portable .NET 0.6.6 has been released! I’m really curious as to whether DotGNU or Mono is more mature/better/usable?? If you have any experiences with both, please feel free to add your comments.

What a blast!

Python’s a blast! – This one’s too funny. Highly recommended for geeks!

Shocker duplicate

There’s another blog with the same name as ‘Dynamically Typed’ :-( This is not fair. I had originally thought of this name. I repeat, I chose this name originally and independently!! It is supposed to be a pun that it is really dynamically typed and also programmers will understand

Which scripting language is right for you?

So, you want to decide your favorite scripting language? – I already had chosen mine – Python. The scores confirm this! – Python scores: 4905 Perl scores: 3395 Ruby scores: 3750 JavaScript scores: 3285

College life…

Yesterday was the last official day of our college (B.E.) lives…I’m feelin’ kinda sad. I wrote the following poem dedicated to all my classmates and friends: Never Same Again I don’t know how these past few years flew, But one thing is true, And I say

Pretty Docbook Form?

Many readers have been askin’ for a PDF version of the book, so here it is! As always, check python.g2swaroop.net for the latest versions.

Fedora Core 2 arrives!

Fedora Core 2 has been released! I can’t wait to get my hands on it – Kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6, GIMP 2.0, k3b, ALSA, GCC 3.4 and much much more. Some cool screenshots and it is already a superhit! If you have

Network security is cool

Here’s an excerpt from ‘The Prometheus Deception’ by Robert Ludlum: "Inside the cargo bay of the green forest-service truck, Elena quickly assembled her tools. Her laptop was now connected to the optical repeater by means of a twenty-foot cable that ran undetectably under the truck, concealed by dirt and

What a robot!

Yesterday, I was lucky to get to watch a demo of Mrinal & Gang’s COMRADE Robot at Yahoo! They have been working on this since a long time and they were sponsored by Yahoo! during this semester as a project, under the guidance of Kalyan. Oh, and how is the

Why Sonia Gandhi as PM of India is a national disaster

In this article by S. Gurumurthy, he clearly points out how Sonia Gandhi has been living in India for 17 years and never lived as an Indian. It makes you stop and wonder, is this the only person we could find to look after our country, a country with one

All about Longhorn

Here’s the one stop shop for all your Longhorn news and information – Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Longhorn Activity Center I love the screenshots put up here.

The Prometheus Deception

I just finished (yet another) Robert Ludlum’s book ‘The Prometheus Deception’, a good fast-paced thriller. I’d recommend it. It’s not just one of those spy thrillers with conspiracy theories – Robert Ludlum knows how to make the capture the attention of the reader. Sometimes, you just can’t

Review Bytes

I recently came across a wonderful review of ‘A Byte of Python’ by the admin of the South Jersey Linux Users’ Group. I have reproduced it here for your convenience. After reading the online book, ‘A Byte of Python’ I feel I know a little more about Python, but not

Longhorn Details!

Another cool article from Extremetech. This time on Longhorn 4072 – the WinHEC build. MS is making good progress on it, but has a long way to go. I am amazed at the progress they are making and how well they are integrating the innumerable components of Longhorn. This is a

I want GMail!

ExtremeTech previews GMail beta. I want an account too! :-(

Mono Beta 1 out!

Mono Beta 1 has been released! Download it now! And it has a very cool logo as well. I have just one gripe with it – if only it worked with FreeBSD… It’s great to see new versions of MonoDevelop and Gtk# also being released. I have to check it

The Adventure of Shivanasamudram!

My friends and myself went on another rockin’ trip this Sunday!! This time it was a planned one ;-) (see Nandi Hills photos if you didn’t get that one) We, five guys – Azmi, Gaurav, Subhojit, Sudheer and Swaroop, had the most amazing fun – we did rock climbing and trekking

Why MySQL?

MySQL is one of the most popular open source softwares – Yes, it has a dual licensing scheme and has been profitable from the beginning. I always wondered why it became so popular, especially when PostgreSQL is such a workhorse and has so many features compared to MySQL. Oreillynet has a

Around the world in a week ?!

Here is the count of unique visitors for my book, categorized by from where they come: ############################################################ #  Report:  python.g2swaroop.net #  Report Name:  Countries #  Date Range:  04/22/2004 - 04/28/2004 ############################################################ (no entry)  204 net (Network)   140 com (Commercial)    117 edu (Educational)   15 de (Germany)    14 it (Italy)  10

Time-out

Nowadays, I have become so involved with my work at Yahoo! that I am hardly getting any time for other stuff. Spending time with friends has also become a problem, but the amazing thing is how Yahoo! Messenger and mobile phones help here. They truly help people keep in touch!

Innovations in C#

I’m reading a very interesting article on the next version of C#. It’s fascinating. I seriously wonder why Java does not make strides like this, especially with supposedly much more widespread support than C# and .NET?? What does the open community lack in making such huge innovations? Don’

First Time Vote!

Today, I voted for the first time! I am one of those large number of FTVs (First Time Voters) in India. It is such a thrill to take part in such a humongous exercise of  democracy. After all, India is the largest democracy in the world! I voted for the

Google – the OS !

I came across this interesting blog entry on The Secret Source of Google’s Power. It talks about how Google has 100,000 servers! It also talks about how Google could become a ‘platform’ for the future. Fascinating stuff!

More translated bytes

My book is now being translated to Spanish and Danish! That’s really cool… I know I shouldn’t be surprised but I am amazed at how people prefer to read books like this one in their own native languages. More than that, these readers are sparing their time and

Midnight Escapade!

We were just cruisin’ at midnight and we want to do more. A few minutes later, we had decided to go to Nandi hills to see the sunrise! This was just so much fun. I feel this much fun should be banned! I’ve put up a writeup as well

Microsoft releases open source code!

Shocking but true! Microsoft has released the WiX toolkit as open source. WiX stands for Windows Installer XML (WiX) developer tool. The software has been released under an IBM license. The shocking thing is that they are releasing it as open source AND they are releasing it on SourceForge.net

Mobile friends

I reluctantly got a mobile phone a few weeks ago due to the insistence of my parents. My thinking was that it would be an invasion of my privacy and something I might get addicted to. Now, I’m starting to like it (as if I had a choice ;-)

The Original and the Next-generation Clone: Java and C#

I always wanted to put down what I felt were the improvements in C# over Java. Looks like I don’t have to do it – Gary Cornell has done a good job of it already.

The Matlock Paper at home

On a friend’s recommendation, I am reading Robert Ludlum’s "The Matlock Paper" – as usual I could put the book down only when I reached 91 pages :-) On another note, it was nice to be just at home and doing nothing. I did play badminton with my 11-year

The sounds of Longhorn

As you must already know, Microsoft’s next-generation Windows which has been code-named Longhorn has been making lot of waves. They’ve been making lot of innovative strides in this Longhorn and they have a lot of cool names for many of Longhorn components as well. One important thing to

Why is Python not as popular as it should be?

There’s a discussion on fogcreek.com about the pros and cons of Python. Really interesting, indeed! Most people agree that Python is a useful language – the only problem is that it doesn’t have enough mindshare of programmers yet. There is no big company promoting Python or an ad

More bytes of Python!

Due to a post on OSNews.com, there have been a lot more visitors for A Byte of Python! There has been about 4440 page views on Monday (29th March 2004) alone! There was also more than 2000 downloads of the book as well. The Urchin analysis software on my

Yahooooo!

I am now a Yahoo! guy!!! The final round of interviews took place yesterday. They asked lot of techie stuff and some very interesting questions. I had 4 interviews one after the other and then Jayanthi (the nice lady from HR) immediately came and told me "You’re through. When

3D Desktop!

Wow! That’s all I could say when I saw the screenshots of Project Looking Glass. This is a 3D Desktop system from Sun Microsystems and it looks very promising indeed! One of the screenshots shows Mozilla – when it is ‘flipped around’ in 3D, it shows the options tab. It

Simputer

The Simputer is a brilliant concept from the professors at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. It is a low cost alternative to PCs – a small handheld computing device which runs on Linux designed to help IT reach the common man. It costs just around Rs. 9000 and it allows you

Team India Shining

After a stupendous 5th One Day International cricket match between India and Pakistan, Vajpayee takes political advantage of it by making ads about it! But, still, that was a match to remember for a long long time. Sachin’s catch was the turning point of the match! Indiatimes.com has

IronPython again

IronPython is to .Net/Mono what Jython is to Java. That’s the simple way of saying things. The reality is that IronPython is a remarkable software and if it is good, then it is due to the talent of it’s creator Jim Hugunin. Jim Hugunin has presented a

Managing The Future Of Open Source Software

There is an open discussion going on about the future of open source software. It all started when Havoc Pennington started a discussion on Java, Mono or C++ – Thoughts on the future of open source desktop development. This was followed by replies from Lupus and by Miguel de Icaza and

Coffee-drinking snakes: Java and Python

Introduction Java and Python are very different languages – yet, it is amazing to note the constant comparisons made between the two languages contrasted with the synergy between the two languages in the form of Jython. Comparing Python and Java Every Python programmer knows that he/she can achieve a lot

Back at the GATE

I logged in casually in the afternoon to check my mail and suddenly Yashwanth tells me that GATE results are out! Then Krishna was also online and told me he got 90 percentile. Congrats, dude! The website wouldn’t open for me as it was swamped with visitors, so, Krishna

Editing Away

A text editor is one of the most important tools in the kit of every programmer. It is the starting point for us when we intend to write programs or anything else. It is therefore important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of our editor as well as being able

More Mono Talk

Edd Dumbill (of XML.com fame) asks the question Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development?. He goes on to talk about the state of Mono, about MonoDevelop along with some cool screenshots, as well as what’s in store for the future.

Java Generics

Bruce Eckel has written a very insightful entry in his blog on Java Generics. It is interesting to note that Java Generics (as proposed) doesn’t significantly add anything that an interface would achieve. I also agree with the part that "it seemed to take C# rather that the loyal

Global Village

My book has been receiving tremendous response. It’s amazing! I have been getting "well done" messages combined with suggestions and corrections from so many people. These helpful readers are from UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, ….! It’s a truly global village out there. The downside was that my

Thanks for coming!

More than 320 visitors have visited my website in the last 2 days alone ! Also, there have been more than 225 downloads of my Python book ( http://www.python.g2swaroop.net/ ) as well !

Language Interoperability Problems!

My article on Mono ( http://www.g2swaroop.net/writings/why-mono/ ) is being discussed at a Slashdot-like site called gildot.org and they are all talking in Spanish! Atleast, I think it is Spanish – I am not sure. If you can understand what they are talking, please tell me what’s

Halloween X

The Halloween 10 document is pretty scary. It’s amazing that Microsoft could stoop to such levels to destroy it’s competition. We all know that this attempt is pretty futile and SCO will get laughed out of court, but this is just so appalling.

Mono talk

I just wrote down a few of my thoughts in an article titled “Why Mono ?” ( http://www.g2swaroop.net/writings/why-mono/ ). It’s about why I think Mono is great and how it makes sense for the next generation of softwares that are going to be written. Mono has the

Bourne Again

I finished reading The Bourne Supremacy. Such an incredibly complex character – this Jason Bourne! There are two parts to this man – the past called Jason Bourne – the vicious assassin and the other, a scholar called David Webbs. This book is all about how he is recruited by the ruthless government

Sys-Con

The Sys-Con awards is an amazing event. The list of winners is literally the who’s who of the software world. Read more at www.sys-con.com.

Calvin and Hobbes

This is one of my all-time comic favorite strips. This is such fun to read Calvin and Hobbes strips. What strikes me most is the expressions of the characters especially Calvin and his dad as well. I’ve heard that the dad character is based on Bill Watterson (the cartoonist)

Nemerle

There is a new kid (language) on the block called Nemerle . It is an interesting hybrid language and at first impression, it looks like a mix of Perl and C#. It has some interesting things such as the when loop instead of the if loop as well as dynamic typing

The Art of Xen

I want to make thing one clear – I don’t like the Microsoft executives (who do their FUD tactics) but I do like the Microsoft engineers such as Anders Hejlsberg who created the C# language. That being said, how would you like to write in a language which talks XML

The Surfin’ Penguin

I finally got a decent 2nd line internet connection from  BSNL – it’s great! It is an ordinary telephone line connection but I have never seen 4-5 kbps average download speed on a telephone line before. I then found out that my friends too surf mostly on Linux because it

Let Java Go!

Eric S Raymond, affectionately called ESR, has called on Sun Microsystems to let Java go and make it open source just like they did for NFS which went on to become very popular. This article has created a lot of controversy in the open source community. The truth is that

Bryan at the gate!

Yesterday morning, I attended the GATE exam. I did very well considering my (lack of) preparation :-) . Paper was quite easy actually considering that it consisted of what we have already studied … but I still feel that the probability of me solving a probability problem is …. I don’t know,

The Samurai Identity

I watched the "The Last Samurai" yesterday – excellent movie. Those Japanese are so disciplined and honourable and spiritual (well, atleast according to the movie). I couldn’t believe it was actually Tom Cruise – this is the first movie of his that I really appreciated. Read "The Bourne Identity" by Robert

Java 1.5 beta

Java 1.5 beta codenamed "Tiger" was released today. I see that a lot of good things from C# have been taken up. For example, boxing and unboxing in C# is now in Java and is called autoboxing and auto-unboxing (No, it is not manual in C#, it is also

KDE 3.2 is here!

The latest, greatest and fastest new version of KDE is here! Check it out at http://dot.kde.org/1075813576/. KDevelop 3.0 has also been released! This new version is just too good. Check out the screenshot at kdevelop.org/graphics/pic_corner/3.0/full_ide.png . For

Red Park

So finally exams are over! I saw  Varsham yesterday in Pallavi theatre. It was a streeeeeetched movie. These guys are so talented that they copied two scenes from Matrix and were able to convert it into a 3 hour movie! But some of the songs and jokes were good. Overall?

Linux 2.6 – The Details

So you have heard that the latest and greatest version of the Linux kernel – 2.6 has been released. What’s it all about? Well, 2.6 has been all about the server and making it more scalable and making it more enterprise-level. Linux has broken so many barriers with

IronPython and Jython

Now this is something really really cool. Jim Hugunin has written an implementation of the Python language which uses .NET CLI as the backend. So what it means that your program is still in Python but it is running on .NET . So what, you say? Yes, I know there is

Bruce Eckel on Python

Python is one of the best languages I have ever come across – you can read about this amazing language in my book ( http://www.python.g2swaroop.net/ ). Here’s what Bruce Eckel (of “Thinking in Java” fame) thinks about Python: http://www.artima.com/intv/tipping.html

Exams going on!

My website is up and I have 7th semester final exams going on! I have to study Perl/CGI and Java today – the problem is the borin’ syllabus books and the Balasubramaniam Java book literally put me to sleep. Sad, but true.

Website finally up!

Hey, my website g2swaroop.net is up and running finally! Although it has a simple and cool interface (if I say so myself), there is a lot of work happening behind the scenes – do read more about it on the About page. To summarise, it has to do mainly with