bangalore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pink-e

Looks like someone sure loves email!

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

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

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’

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

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

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?

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

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]

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)

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

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

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

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

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,

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.

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.

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!

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

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!

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]

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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,

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

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

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

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 ;)

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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