Friday, June 09, 2006

Srivaishnavan and Samashrayanam

Day before yesterday was a remarkable day for me as a Srivaishnavan. Yes, the day which turned myself into a Srivaishnavan. The day on which Pancha SamakAram was performed on me by the Acharyan. While I was searching bits and bytes to explain about what it is, I found this self-explanatory link here and ,fyi, the narrator/author is my elder brother ;-) and Yes, we three, including my younger brother, got transformed into a Srivaishnavan, the very same day.

Friday, June 02, 2006

Am I getting popular in orkut?

Orkut, an online friends network is one of the popular web-applications of its kind. They recently added a feature that shows you the count of people who viewed your profile. Two days back, I started hunting for known faces and quickly added around 12+ and still 6 are yet to accept my requests. Now when I opened my profile, voila, see it your self.

Your profile views:
Since Feb '06: 215, Last week: 67, Yesterday: 61

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Long long ago...

Its Long break since I wrote my last blog. Things in life has changed quite a lot. No more regular nightouts, dinner before 10:00 PM, commuting through BMTC bus to office and change in my regular diet. Everything happened because of the low-battery-warning raised by my body, which is under rejunuvation now with the help of ayurvedic medicines. Atleast, I am getting good sleep these days. :-)

More than that, a one month medical vacation due to Paronychia on my right-hand-index finger, which costed the entire nail on that finger, changed my weird way of living and brought some Indian-way-of-living (adhering close to IST). I guess, it would take another couple of months to see some nail in that finger as well as a complete change in my timings.

Also, I have got BSNL DataOne 900Plus unlimited broadband and you don't believe it, it is amazingly quite fast and good. If you have type-II modem, it is quite easy to make it work with Linux. All you have to do is to set DNS entries properly in your modem and enable DHCP. If you have a wireless modem, you don't need to configure anything in Linux, it just picks it up and you are connected to internet. BTW, I am using SLED10. :-)

[My fitness schedule is lagging by couple of months...]

Quite a lot of things happening in the F/OSS community that I am currently involved. Will keep them posted, gotta sleep, its 1:27 AM.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Travelogue: NCAC - 2005, PSG Tech, Coimbatore.

It was a dynamic decision to deliver the keynote address on 24th December at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, on the second day of NCAC-2005 held on 23-24 December 2005. Entire journey happened in a hacky fashion. Yes, the topic for the keynote address was Open Source. I was supposed to board the train on 23rd night, but found out that the train was running 1 hr late and fortunately, Saravana Prabhu had a bus ticket booked for himself to participate in YAM (Young Alumni Meet). I boarded the bus, (heh?, yes, I exchanged my train ticket for the bus ticket) to Coimbatore hoping to influence few of the best minds to join the Open Source Hackers league. Due to recent heavy rain, the roads were not in good shape and the journey was (huh?) comfortable.

Arul from PSG was very cordial to me and he took me to their guest house. The event started around 9:30 AM, with my laptop not able to adjust itself to the configuration of the projector. The hall had almost every seat filled with students and lecturers. The presentation was originally targeted for students with a little knowledge about Open Source (assumption was made after the inauguration of Open Source Lab happened just few weeks before). The 100+ participants in the hall were completely Microsoft users and hardly know anything about Open Source. I presented them a different view of Open Source, which left the audience wanting for more. The participants were very responsive and the quality of questions that they asked about Open Source amazed me. It showed their interest and passion towards open source. Also, not to forget, the quality of the content delivered by the speaker, which is me. (The authors views are the authors only !) At the end of keynote, I was presented with a nice memento.

My return train to Chennai was around 9:00 PM, so, after lunch, I met one of the Professors, and discussed with her on how to bring Open Source as a method of Study by Research. Later, to some pre-final students, I demonstrated about few keys to the open source world, viz., IRC, mailing-lists, bugzilla and CVS, with my very own Mobile-internet. At the end of the day, I had few friends which was by far the best thing that happened all day. I bid farewell to those students at 8:00 PM and boarded the train around 8:45 PM which was relatively comfortable.

Kudos and Open Source ki jai :-)

To get through the hardest journey we need to take
only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping