Moving to ekalayva.wordpress.com

2007-12-13T05:21:00.000-08:00

Capture a Snapshot of Chennai

2007-10-31T05:01:00.000-07:00

Here is a unique attempt to capture a snap of Chennai. On the 3rd of November 2007, we invite every Chennaiite to for one second, at exactly 03:11 PM, stop whatever it is that they are doing, and click, shoot, snap, capture or photograph that moment, just hold that one instant frozen in a picture and upload it on flickr.
Visit the 311 website for more details.

I am excited to see the results.

Sync your clockie

Do we remember history?

2007-10-27T03:09:00.000-07:00

Remember this photograph by Raghu Rai, the photo-journalist? He won the World Press Photo of the Year 1984. That is not the subject of this post.

This child was a victim of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of Dec 1984.
Union Carbide's subsidiary's pesticide plant released 40 Tonnes of Methyl Iso Cyanate gas causing nearly 22000 deaths. The people there still face physical disorders and are exposed to toxic elements in their environment.
Reason for this:
Compromises by the company on safety equipment installation and workplace safety because of cost-cutting measures to compensate for losses.
Read more on the accident here and here.

And guess what, the company is back in India now setting up a 1000 person R&D Centre in Chennai and recruiting from the elite institutions like the IIT.

The survivors and victims of the tragedy (as part of International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal) are in Chennai to appeal to students, citizens from other walks of life to ponder and act over this.

Where? Nochikuppam Community Hall, Near Marina Light House
When? 29th Oct , 4:30 PM

I read about it in Harish's blog.
Below is a document on the agenda.
http://www.harishpalaniappan.com/blog/ICJB_Chennai%20Handout.pdf
Photos by Raghu Rai:
http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=Mod_ViewBoxInsertion.ViewBoxInsertion_VPage&R=2TYRYDDG70XJ&RP=Mod_ViewBox.ViewBoxThumb_VPage&CT=Album&SP=Album

The burman crisis - a few live blogs.

2007-09-27T04:28:00.000-07:00

Here are a few live bloggers writing on the crisis in the burman capital

http://moemaka.blogspot.com/
http://ko-htike.blogspot.com/
http://mr-jade.blogspot.com/

And a few pics on the reuters site
http://www.reuters.com/resources/r/?m=02&d=20070927&t=2&i=1836763&w=&r=2007-09-27T094548Z_01_B588599_RTRUKOP_0_PICTURE0

No for OOXML Standardisation in India

2007-08-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

Read this article

India and China says a No
Malaysia, Denmark and Switzerland say a Yes
US of A abstains from voting.

And here are a few interesting perspectives:
http://www.arstdesign.com/articles/OOXML-is-defective-by-design.html
Criticism by competitors and open source companies

The i-day happenings

2007-08-15T02:21:00.000-07:00

It all started when I saw Sagaro's blog entry on a pothole filling drive on our roads on independence day eve. Added my name in the wiki, and joined them at the Velachery Bus Stand at 9. After the ice breaking, we split into two groups - one stayed at Velachery to fix the ones on the Velachery-Guindy road and the other(including me) moved to Mandaveli. We started our activities after the traffic subsided, it was almost 12 by then. Till the time we wound up @ around 5, we had fixed quite a few potholes in RAPuram and Mandaveli and the other group had finished the potholes identified in Velachery.

The one that I didnt expect but liked was the 'I fixed >' stencil which we used to mark with paint on each fix that we did. The letter 'I' was painted with the tricolors. It gave a sense of ownership for what we did.

Both groups met up @ 3. Filling potholes though seems easy is a back breaking job. The best part was the energy levels of ppl and fun we had together.

To sum up, it was a fantastic experience to meet up with 16 ppl from different parts of the city, know them and put some worthwhile effort on something useful together. I thought we should do this more often.
It was 630 IST when I reached home. Had a shower and left by 7:20 to Office. Took a snap of to-be Vikram Sarabhais and Amartya Sens of the Sholinganallur Govt School while at the bus stop.

The flag hoist was @ 8:00 exact. Reached there exactly 2 mins before hoist. Hats off to the security personnel who had made the arrangements. They put up a professional show. Still, I am always against my office's policy of having sturdy gentlemen at the reception desk ;).

After munching thru the laddus (the most important part of the day) tat were distributed, I left. Reached home and dropped dead. Woke up a while back. The day till now has been fantastic, the only things I missed were the Frisbee game @ the Bessie beach and a snap of a lil Indra Nooyi from Sholinganallur school.

Here's one more

2007-07-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

The Chennai Corporation chooses to use OpenOffice in all its computers in the Rippon Building and zonal offices in a bid to cut its computing bills.

The ELCOT Success Story

2007-07-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

Electronics Corporation Of TamilNadu embraces OSS and migrates from Microsoft Windows to SUSE Linux. Here's UmaShankar, Director, ELCOT giving a video presentation on the migration and how it helped ELCOT.

He talks of Applications developed inhouse using open source technologies for:
1. Property Registration
2. Issue of Family ID Card
3. Issue of Farmer Cards
& yeah, The world's first Linux Powered ATM developed by ELCOT.
Employees come out with how these are helping day-to-day functioning of the Corporation.

Great work ELCOT !! Way to go!

Proto Registration Confirmed !!!

2007-07-14T12:56:00.000-07:00

Did you know that my proto.in registration got confirmed?
Mood: Happy!!

Chennai Linux User Group Meeting

2007-07-14T12:36:00.001-07:00

I attended the Chennai Linux User Group meeting at the IIT this afternoon. I had joined the group about a month back. There were two sessions

1. Debian Linux by Kumar
[History of the distro, methods and steps in installing it, pros of using Debian Linux, community processes, contributing, bug fixing mechanisms, the toy story and more.. ]

2. Ruby on Rails by [Er.. I don remember his name.].
He demoed an application built his team on ROR for a client in 5-6 days.

And yeah, I should admit it. I fell in love with the IIT Campus once more. It's so so green. Deers wandering around. Sigh! They charged me Re. 1 to take me from the gates to the GC in a battery powered vehicle. :) So cheap, haina? You'll forget that you're in Chennai till you come out of the gates.

Vote for the H2O Chennai Poll

2007-07-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

Are you a chennaite?
Do you care for safe drinking water?
Ever wondered where the water you drink comes from?
Ever bothered to enquire about your water can supplier agency?

Take this simple poll to assist us in evaluating public awareness on this simple issue.

Got a Google Mashup Editor account !!!

2007-07-10T00:06:00.000-07:00

Got a invite mail yesterday night from the GME team. Was waiting for it all this while. Started tinkering with it. The mashup editor provides a lil web-based IDE to create, test and publish our mashups.
GME provides tags [both UI related and data related] like gm:page, gm:tabs, gm:list & of course HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

GME also provides a Javascript API via which we get direct access to objects in the application and also manipulate [Create, Read, Update & Delete ] data feed entries. It is possible to perform customized event handling for all application components.

You can find recent entry titles of my two blogs in this lil mashup.

Ariviyal Anandam

2007-07-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

AID India, a volunteer organisation is working towards making 'learning science' easier and interesting for children in the Government Schools of Krishnagiri. "Ariviyal Anandam" means "joy of science" in the Tamizh language.

AID INDIA has developed kits containing low cost visually stunning experiments to invoke excitement and curiousity in the children.
The kits contain 35 experiments (7 experiments on each topic like Light, Air Pressure, Water, Sound, Mechanics).

Science teachers and resource persons from AID India train science teachers and Block Resource Teachers (BRTs) in the blocks of Uthangkarai, Mathur, Bargur, Kaveripattinam, Veppanapalli, Hosur, Thally and Kelamangalam on the implementation of the Ariviyal Anandam programme.

This is an collaborative initiative with Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. 15000 children from class 7 and 8 would be benefiting from this.

UNICEF has allotted Rs.8.88 lakh towards the purchase of science experiment kits and training of science teachers in all schools in Krishnagiri district

To know more on the project, visit this link

More links:
http://chennai.aidindia.org/aidtnnews.html#news5
http://www.hindu.com/2007/02/06/stories/2007020600700300.htm
http://publications.aidindia.org/content/view/417/56/

Embedding swf in html on AIR

2007-07-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

Did you ever know that you can't embed a swf inside html in an Adobe AIR Application?? Am surprised !! Wondering whether there are any work-arounds.

Suse linux training to panchayat officials

2007-07-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

Are you an open source geek?
Are you in Tamil Nadu?
Are you interested and do you have quality time in volunteering towards delivering professional training to officials in a panchayat office near you in Tamil Nadu?

Visit this link on the chennailug wiki.

My new blog on transport safety

2007-07-02T13:55:00.000-07:00

I am launching a new blog on transport safety. Here is the link - http://transport-safety-chennai.blogspot.com/

Chennai Flex User Group Meet Pics

2007-06-28T22:51:00.001-07:00

Here are pics from Raghu's Cam of the Chennai Flex User Group's First Meet [we remembered that the camera is a great invention only after quite a few ppl had left :(]!! Me on the extreme right.

Registering new businesses in India

2007-06-28T01:13:00.000-07:00

Here is a useful link from Harish's blog on starting and registering new businesses in India.
- Registering new Businesses in India

AIR Pocket Guide for JavaScript Developers

2007-06-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

Adobe Integrated Runtime for Javascript - Pocket Guide electronic copy is available free to download from ajaxian.

http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-air-free-book-download

Njoi!!

मेरा पहला पहला हिंदी ब्लोग पोस्ट

2007-06-12T00:43:00.000-07:00

पहला पहला ब्लोग पोस्ट है - यह मेरा पहला पहला हिंदी ब्लोग पोस्ट है !!! :):)

Building better AJAX Applications

2007-06-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

Google Gears presentation by Aaron Boodman:

Experience the sample Gearpad application here. You need to install google gears to try the application.

E-governance and open source in India

2007-06-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

Here are a few posts and articles on open source adoption in Kerala and Tamilnadu.

Indian states eye open source
TamilNadu may shut door on Microsoft
Red hat helps Kerala Government:

My new plone site

2007-06-11T18:43:00.000-07:00

Plone is an open source content management system that runs on the Zope web server. I've been using plone for over half a year now. I administer our internal account portal. I rate it the coolest CMS in the world. It has a fantastic UI, excellent workflow, robust performance and it is the easiest thing to administer.

I always wanted to host a plone site on the web. Thanks to objectis.org, I've one now. Here it is - http://webtrot.objectis.net/ It is Plone 2.5 and comes with the following products pre-installed.

Products available for Install
# ATPhoto 1.0-alpha1 build 53
# CMFNotification 0.9.9
# CalendarX 0.6.6(stable) 2006-01-03
# FlickrAlbum 0.1
# InkStain 1.0rc1
# LinguaPlone 0.9.0 - $Revision: 10093 $
# Marshall 0.6.6-final
# PloneErrorReporting 1.0
# PloneGossip 1.0-unreleased
# PloneLanguageTool 1.3
# RichDocument 2.0rc1
# StagingAddOn 1.5
# TextIndexNG3 3.1.13
# ZWiki ZWiki-0-58-0

Installed
* Archetypes 1.4.1-final
* CMFPlacefulWorkflow 1.0.2
* MimetypesRegistry 1.4.1-final
* PasswordResetTool 0.4.1
* PortalTransforms 1.4.1-final
* kupu kupu 1.3.8

The missing one is FCKEditor. Anyway, thanks to objectis.org for this hosting.

Flex Chennai User Group

2007-06-11T18:23:00.000-07:00

The Flex Chennai User Group had a kick-off last week at HeyMath Inc, Alwarpet. I had been there. Raghu from Adobe had come. Attendees were flash developers, java developers and people who had been working with Flex for long. We got introduced to each other (primary key was the blog name ;)). Raghu briefed on the flex resources available on the internet. There were discussions on few of the flex features too. Looking forward for the next meet.

Flex India User Group

Adobe Apollo is now Adobe Integrated Runtime

2007-06-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

Flex 3 is out, I downloaded a copy of it yesterday. Tinkering with it. And I am excited about Adobe Apollo, or should I say AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). The SDK is out. This has been a happening week..

Adobe AIR's
Flash Engine - Tamarin VM
HTML Engine - Webkit
Aptana IDE has an AIR Plug-in. Download it here
and I think AIR has some PDF rendering abilities too..

I am trying out a lil offline application with AIR. Shall post the source code when done..

On techtamil and its poll feature

2007-05-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

I've been following techtamil for a while now. I find it scaling up well. It's filling a space which has been quite vacant for long.

I am trying out a poll feature that it offers here.. Please vote !

Try it out here : http://techtamil.in/polls

The Sun Tech Summit Briefings

2007-05-22T11:23:00.001-07:00

Here is the presentation that I and Ayyappan compiled after the Tech Summit. We used Flex [Adobe made it open source a few days back.] & Notepad [Comes with Win XP ;)] to create it.

You can view it @ http://webtrot.on.googlepages.com/suntechsummit.html

Flex Source: click here [it is just a single mxml file]

Yahoooooooooo!!

2007-05-14T11:24:00.000-07:00

I am going to Bangalore to attend the Sun Technology Summit this Friday. Key words that my ears shall listen are SOA, AJAX and Web 2.0

Here is the link for details on the session

Speed - recklessness - accident - loss - pain - sorrow

2007-05-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

Speed & recklessness - these are the top ranking attributes that i find in 30-40 % of the vehicles that cruise through the OMR. Pedestrians and cyclists are no exceptions in their road-crossing expeditions.

The blog's title is a sequence. That's what happened over a month ago on the Old Mahabalipuram Road. And witnessing that sequence has had a huge impact on me.

Sarathy , his Dad & Mom along with neighbour kids Vinodhini and Swetha were hit by a speeding car somewhere near Navalur. The mother died on the spot. All others were injured. The Dad was unconscious. All three kids seemed to be below 10. Sarathy had a head injury right on top of his skull, a cut on the face from his mouth leading to his ear. The heads of Vinodhini and Swetha were bleeding. Swetha also had a fracture in the leg. Luckily, the injured were ported in a van (running for a software company in Navalur) that was passing by to the nearest hospital. And this hospital is the one at Sholinganallur. It is small and facilities aren't enough to handle a major emergency like this.

I was waiting for my friend to get his SIM recharged in the shop very next to the hospital. I was shocked to see the scene @ the hospital. The doctor was hurrying the people to take them to the nearest speciality hospital [Lifeline @ Perungudi]. There was jus the driver and another person in the car. So, me and my friend Kandaraja got into the Vehicle, positioned the kids on our laps so that we could support them. We started moving in another minute. Vinodhini and Swetha were conscious and screaming in pain. I was at least consoled with the fact that they were reactive. But Sarathy whom I was holding in my hand showed no signs of movement. I knew he was breathing, but his half-closed eyes were very discouraging. His head had a deep cut.

Meanwhile, Ajay and Kumar who were nearby called up Lifeline and informed them of this and asked them to keep the life systems ready. That helped.

The Old Mahabalipuram Road is the worst in this world when you're travelling on a vehicle with a half-alive kid on your laps and you want to keep motion minimal. Your frustration will know no bounds. Even more when you know nothing of first aid. All I did was
(i) Keep his neck from drooping so that his nasal tract doesn't get blocked
(ii) Place my hands tight over his head at the point of bleeding so that I prevent blood loss.
(iii)Kept pounding his chest at intervals.

I dont know if it helped at all. We were there in another 15-20 mins.

Once we reached the hospital, stretchers were brought and the kids were directly taken to the emergency ward. The Dad who was lying in the rear compartment of vehicle was declared as 'brought dead'. Soon, two policemen dropped in. The status that we got from the Doctor when we left the hospital that night was - Sarathy was still in a serious condition, the other two kids have head injuries but were out of danger.

I returned to Lifeline the next morning. Heard from the doc there that the kids had been transported to the Central G.H. the prior night after a visit by the Thuraipakkam police.

I went to the Central GH and saw the kids. Vinodhini and Swetha were conscious and reacting to their parents. Sarathy was breathing heavily. Learnt from the doctor that Sarathy's condition was still unstable, but was showing signs of improvement.

6 days later, I got news from Sarathy's relative that Sarathy had passed away @ 830 PM that night without regaining consciousness and they're leaving the hospital. Mom, then Dad and at last their Son too. A whole family was doomed in a just a fraction of a second. I had no words to console the guy when talking over the phone.

The next day, I met the other two kids at the hospital. Both little heads were bandaged. Good that at least they were recovering well. Swetha's numbness of the leg also was improving.

Patheticity of the IT highway's road infrastructure, haste and recklessness of the drivers, and pedestrians' carelessness while crossing roads are major reasons for frequent accidents on this highway.

Dont you feel that these should be termed 'incidents' rather than 'accidents'?

Dont you feel something(s) needs a change?

World's first browser

2007-05-04T21:18:00.001-07:00

Do you know how the world's first web browser [browser-editor as it was called] looked like? It was written by Tim Berner's Lee in 1990 at the CERN labs. It was called the "WorldWideWeb" See the screenshot below..

The lost weekend

2007-03-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

Just as any other weekend, these 2 days too passed by. Lazed away most of it. Watched Mozhi on saturday evening and Lage Raho Munna Bhai this morning. I liked both movies. Watched Mozhi at Aradhana with sis. As usual Jo rocks with her expressions (she's featured deaf and dumb in the movie.) I also had a stroll into the Ambal nursery that's very next to the theatre jus before the film started. Impressive collection of plants and saplings. Should bring Mom here someday. Had lunch with sis and her friend at Besant Nagar this afternoon. A long nap after that and now, a bina-sleep sunday night (er.. should i be saying monday morning?).

And yeah a new update. i ve added a hit counter to my site.

Wanna contribute to a collaborative book authored on a wiki?

2007-02-26T11:38:00.000-08:00

And what rocks is that the book is on organising unconferences [ meets whose agenda is not organized in advance but driven by participants ]. Wales launched this book proj during yesterday's camp.

To contribute content to the book, visit http://www.unconference.info/

To see the milestones of the project click here

Jimmy Wales in Chennai

2007-02-25T10:34:00.000-08:00

Today was pretty interesting. We (me and sis) spent almost the whole day at the Tidel park auditorium. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia was in the city for the WikiCamp co-ordinated by the Free Knowledge Foundation co-sponsored by Zoho, Sify and a few others.

The first hour was wholly him giving a touch of the philosophy behind the wikipedia project. That of making knowledge free and accessible to the common man. The day went on with people discussing on the importance of the sustenance of such a project. Few debated the business model, particularly on why wikipedia is still not open to advertising which could help improve its revenue. Jim clearly expressed his view that the motive behind this project had something to do which was not financially driven and wikipedia had enough money to stay on its own. He talked on the initial failures of the project (owing to a very stringent mechanism of verification of content), then how by shifting gears by laying trust and responsibility on the community the plot worked. He had spent over 2,50,000 $ by the end of 2 yrs and there were only 12 articles in the whole portal. Isn't that a very discouraging number? Thanks to the all the wikipedians throughout the world, now it has a whooping 1,657,879 articles in english and 7,171 in tamil alone.

India's most prolific wikipedian Bhadani with over 45,000 edits gave a "wikipedia for dummies" session post lunch. Sundar who posts a lot of tamil articles on wikipedia gave a presentation on posting in regional languages.

There were sessions by other participants too. Yuvraj from Novatium gave an insight into how the company is entering the software-as-a-service market in KK Nagar in Chennai for providing internet access without a computer, but with a device powered by 2 mobile processors. Narain had a session in the evening on semantic web technologies. He talked on simile , ibm open-eyes, the openid project and stuff.. Sowmya Karmali had a presentation of the dynamics of using wikis within a corporate. Was impressed to know that they execute projects for the Grameen Micro Credit Foundation .

There were parallel sessions in the afternoon. I had to miss a presentation by Mohammed Mahir on some tool to browse the tamil wiktionary.

And yeah, I met Gautam from IIT at the camp whom I stumbled upon in a bus almost half a year back. Today was tiring, interesting, full of wiki and editing. I think i've had enuf for today.

You can find a few snaps here..

Sanskrit and panini

2007-02-24T00:24:00.000-08:00

My fascination and curiosity on sanskrit all these days have surfaced again after i read a few articles and research papers by subhash kak. Read his research on the grammar notation which was used by Panini (a 5th century b.c. grammarian) which is another reflection of the concepts forming the root of the Backus-Naur form (1959) which is presently used to represent grammar of computing languages. I also came across a website by seshukarthik. Here is the link to his sanskrit site - sanskritvoice.com. I've included a glossary link to my blog too which would present 3 random sanskrit words and their meanings. Mission - Learn sanskrit. ;)

Hypertext and the Web - Well Explained

2007-02-22T03:50:00.001-08:00

Content on the web has changed over past few years like this

Here goes post no.1

2007-02-22T03:39:00.000-08:00

5 p.m. now. Got internet access till 7. I ve earlier created a blog to which I posted twice. This time, I use my google id to create a blog. Good isn't it when you have single sign-on to a variety of applications. Thanks to Google, thanks to the web.