Category Archive

Very much !! It has been over a month now since I blogged last. Here are a few things that I did in the last 30 days:

• Created a website for my college alumni. It’ll be up soon.
• Attended the RIA Architect Summit in Bangalore. Met up with a couple of friends. Got a small treat from Priyanka for the new car she has bought.
• Went to my home place in Kerala and attended a cousin’s wedding. Met my grandma, cousins & relatives. While returning back, I got a new friend in the Mangalore Mail Express. More about it in the next post. It deserves one ;).
• Broke fast, lunched, dined & slept every single day. Not once did I skip

Mom called me in the morning and reminded that today is Vishu. Being away from home today means missing VishuKani, good food & some investment. Sigh!!

Update: One more thing that I did was missing my mobile.  My Sony Ericsson k700i slipped off my pocket while alighting from an auto.  I noted it only after a couple of minutes and returned to the place where I got down.  A search for nearly half an hour didnt result in anything useful.  It served me for more than two years.  To make things clear and leave no space for rumour, let me say again that I lost nothing else except my mobile :).

The corollary of the above equation holds good. I cleared my software-quality-certification examination without knowing that people named Pareto and Juran ever lived in this world (one of the two mandatory tests that my comp wants me to clear before this year ends). The next one happens tomorrow. Keep tuned.

Update (12th Dec 2007 11 AM):

At times, few theories and equations prove to be wrong practically. I got some proof today.

This is my new address on the web. I used to blog earlier (t)here. WordPress offers a cleaner look, a lot of themes and assists easy customisation. I am impressed. Here I come..

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

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

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

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/

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.

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

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

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

Google Gears presentation by Aaron Boodman:

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

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

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..

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.

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.

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

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.