Monthly Archive

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.

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!

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

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.

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 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.

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/

A 19 member State Road Safety Council has been formed. Read this article on The Hindu.

Chairman of the Council: Transport Minister
Member Secretary of the Council: Transport Secretary

See this and this. This squad is a result of the Student Traffic Volunteer Scholarship scheme by the Institute of Road Traffic Education.

I also came across a post on the life-saving campaign of a class 5 school student Deepika Easwaran. Hats off!!

Imagine a day when there is 0% foot boarding in buses in Chennai. It’s not far away. The MTC has decided to go for only buses with doors. As part of the major fleet expansion that’s planned before Deepavali, 1000 buses are to be added [augmentation and replacement included] and it’s been recommended to have doors in all.

This is a welcome move by the MTC. Hopefully, we’ll see less news of ‘man slips from footboard from bus and runover by mtc bus’ in Hindu page 3.

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.

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.

I came across the National Road Safety Policy Draft on the website of Department of Road Transport and Highways. I created a page out of it for me to comprehend better.
Here it is!!
It works cleanly on Firefox. Internet explorer users better read it on the Ministry’s website itself

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

Hi All,

I am creating this blog to project my views on transport safety in Chennai. Hopefully, it would help to improve the present state of affairs.

An event that made me create this blog