Moving to ekalayva.wordpress.com

Capture a Snapshot of Chennai

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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 !!!

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

Chennai Linux User Group Meeting

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

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 !!!

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

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

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

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.