First year Birthday of Tejas

Phew, my son Tejas is already one year old. It seems as if he was born yesterday!... It was a very nice parenting experience. His naughty smiles, tiresome... late night cries, his first teeth (the pain he and we as parents experienced). His hugs when I leave to office and come back from office (if he is awake)... and lot more...
For him 1st year birthday celebrations were all too new. He was hyperactive whole day.

We had simple family style aarti (Indiam tradition) for him and at evening a little bit of cake cutting after visiting temple.

Here are some pics of event.









Cake cutting.






Clapping hands when having cake from grandma.

Zen to Done by Leo Babauta

Well, if you are Productivity practitioner, you may be already aware of David Allen's GTD (Getting Things Done) and Leo Babauta's ZTD (Zen to Done). The beauty of ZTD is in its simplicity. BTW, there is a concept of Minimalistic ZTD also. In the below image 1 to 4 habits constitute Minimalistic ZTD.
So, when I learnt about ZTD at Zen Habits, my first instict was to convey the same message in picture. Hence a thought to put the concept in mind map.
The principles explained are also published as an e-book.
I have not bought the E-book, but greatly benefited by the principles described in the Zen habits. Below is my effort to put the essence of ZTD into an image generated by freemind mindmap.
Please visit Zen Habits to learn more. Comments and improvements are welcome.

Busy!? BreakAway.

Well... After a long time.... thought will write and post something.
Past two months were pretty busy. Decided to move on to new house.
Shifting was hectic. Yet settling down.
Getting internet connection established took 2 weeks. Had to run around to change the postal address for services availed.

Workwise, hectic weeks.

A look back into past.
A pic from Singapore:



An evening in Karwar:


So long... Will be back soon.

BOINC and SETI@HOME

Unused idle time of my computer made me think of contributing something to community. There are lot of projects from cluster to desktop grid computing, which can utilize your personal computer's idle time. SETI@HOME is the one which attracted me first, then there is Rosetta@home. Around one month back I downloaded BOINC and started contributing to SETI@HOME project.
Why BOINC? Easily available for Ubuntu Feisty running on my HPL2000 amd64 laptop. By the way, it also supports Windows, MAC and Solaris. As it is opensource, you can build your own flavour also.
A Fair warning: BOINC once starts running a task, utilizes your cpu to 100%, so don't panic.

What is in it or me? Satisfaction of contribution to community!

At the end of this page I have posted my BOINCStats
Refer to the links above to know more about the projects and how you can contribute.

Put in your comments and findings on such different projects.

Being Parents

Yesterday (26JUL2007) is one memorable day in our life. We became parents!!! (first time in life!) . The birth of baby boy happened at 12:19PM(IST) and baby weighed 3.26Kg. The feeling is difficult to explain in words, so below link for pics...

First photos of my son.

ಕನ್ನಡ, Ruby ಮತ್ತು Watir

Well this week I had a look at Firefox and kannada issue. The interesting thing is I could see the kannada fonts flawlessly in firefox/feisty combination after following through the steps at http://sampada.net/fonthelp. Only thing I did extra is pull fonts from Optional step from http://dev.sampada.net/wiki/Kannada-on-Ubuntu-Edgy and put it in $HOME/.fonts, then did below steps:
$ cd $HOME/.fonts
$ touch *
$ fc-cache -fv

Restarted the FF, viola! I am able to see the kannada sites pretty well.

Now, coming to Ruby, a new language... Really nice. Has lot of potential as far as my day today scripting. Watir a test automation framework for UI. Hope it picks up the speed, and gives a best OpenSource alternative. Right now it supports only IE, I was expecting a support for Firefox or any OpenSource browser.

Put in your thoughts on this change...

Traffic Jam everywhere!

Travelling a mere 30 KMs in Bengaluru taking up 2 hours 30 Minutes!(let me agree it usually takes 1 hour 15 minuts). This was the situation yesterday night here in Bengaluru.
Top it up with travelling a mere 10 kilomenters for 3 minutes over 1 hour!!! ( from electronic city to bommanahalli). Oh! did I mention, I travelled with company provided bus service, if it would have been me driving my small car, its unthinkable.
The cause, initial mansoon rain(and I am not talking anything about heavy rains). Its not just blaming, I appreciate the things happening, when it was non-rainy season, the expansion of Hosur road really helped to lessen the travel time... But, a small look at the kind of work done, reducing the drainage size, and not cleaning them properly and you will foresee the impact, which I feel caused lot of water to stay on the roads (actually I mean to say here the water content is so much that, you can call it a small pond), results .... problems to the pedestrains as well the vehicle drivers, now who want to line up on the single lane where stay water is less. Over this the traffic signals not working. Considering the vehicle flow on the roads, the traffic jam is bound to happen.
All appreciation goes to the traffic police who stood by late night to make sure the vehicles are moving.
The traffic Jam which i mentioned was on one route, on Hosur road, BTM 21st main, Outer ring road near JP Nagar 15th main. As of now, i am not really aware if similar situations would have been observed on Mysore road, Airport road, Richmond road etc.

I think its high time, government takes a notice on kind of work done for expanding the road. The drainage system whether during planning/implementing phase or sustaining phase should be more well planned. I feel this could solve these kind of situations. Now, if the necessary action is not taken, bengalureans have to live with it.

Hope there is already a lesson learnt in October 2005 rains, water overflow caused so many problems in HSR layout and Madiwala. This would be our chance to standup and take notice and foresee the situation.

Moving from Knoppix to Ubuntu.

Well... its very late to reveal this. I am using Ubuntu from long time, say from the time of release of edgy eft.(Ubuntu 6.10). The main reason to move to Ubuntu; is very vast distribution, and streamlined forums, where i get answers to most of the problems i face. Of course it is trying to be the best Desktop OS. Beryl is awesome. Following are some of snapshots...



Now, waiting for feisty fawn. Have lot of expectations too...

Typing made easy with DSK!

Yesterday, i was thinking about the amount of typing i do, whether it is Documentation/Coding, and the impact on hands. That is when i stumbled upon this Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.

There are 2 ways to use it, one go for new Dvorak Keyboards, (where the keys are arranged in the Dvorak layout). Second one is free, software implementation.
Most of the Operating Systems (Windows, MAC or *nix) support Dvorák Layout.

So its just a matter of changing the input layout to US-Dvorak!.
You get good amount of information here and here.

I have just started to learn it. Will post my finding after some days, when i will really start using it.

Music and Musings.

Today, when i am traveling to office, i took my brother's handy music set (Sony NetMD along with Bose headsets). The travel takes approximately 1.5 hours.

I am amazed with the quality of sound and song on a MiniDisc, when compared to new Age Memory based MP3 players! I am not crazy about music and sound, but surely i love to listen good music. Well i can tell the impedence and power impacts on a speaker output quality. But, if you ask my brother, he will tell all about, how 2.1 is different from 5.1, and if you need a reciever to listen 5.1 encoded DVD, how to improve quality of sound of normal FM stations or Satellite Radio etc. etc.

My brother has done really good job in bringing in this combination of NetMD and Bose headsets.

Thanks Harsha! You have really nice collection of songs.

ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಬ್ಲಾಗ್...

ಬರೆಯಲು ಇದು ನನ್ನ ಮೊದಲ ಪ್ರಯತ್ನ. ನಾನು ಊಪಯೊಗಿಸುವದು ಉಬುಂಟು ಲಿನಕ್ಸ. ಇಂದಿನವರೆಗೆ ಲಿನಕ್ಸನಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬರೆಯುವದು ಬಹು ಕಷ್ಟವೆಂದು ಪರಿಗಣಿಸಲಾಗುತ್ತಿತ್ತು, ಆದರೆ ಇಂದು OpenOffice.org ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಬರೆಯುವದನ್ನು ಬಹಳ ಸುಲಭ ಮಾಡಿದೆ.

Sufferings from Reliance land line

It was winter of 2004, and had moved into a new rented house, and my family moved in. That is when I realized that I need a landline connection at home (even though I had a reliance mobile). So, at that time the best offer going on was reliance.... pay Rs. 1800, immediate connection and you are ready to go. The new technology called WLL, having good Internet speed (oh! Forgot to mention, you need to pay another Rs 1200/- to buy a data cable), and only 40 Paise/min from landline to my mobile! Wow.... that was my expression. On one Sunday I bought this marvelous piece of junk. Wow!!! started to use it within an hour....

Then started sufferings.... No proper signal ( is WLL similar to CDMA/GSM?).... connection drops out. And bills are tooo high! It went to hit peaks when I bought the so called data cable so that I can surf Internet at home. The connection speed was pathetically low ( oh! The guys said that ideally it should be 116 Kbps, but practically u will not get more than 28 Kbps, thats pathetically lower than BSNL Internet connection which at least guarantees around 56 Kbps). This lands us into higher amount of time to browse the same content / chat, and we have to pay higher amounts. Every concern informed to reliance was not et all taken care.

Come winter of 2006, the quality and service of reliance remained same; no improvements. My telephone bills are alarming, considering the BSNL provided broadband (dataone) at reasonable price. So customer (myself) decided to move for BSNL. Went to cancel the landline connection, ( I would like to refer the disconnection method too here, when going for connection reliance mentioned that, just to return handset and give a discontinuation request; that's it, within 2 days the connection will be removed). So, myself and my brother promptly went there and returned the handset. Oh ! That was smooth, except that they had questions like “ why are you discontinuing?”, and so on... well every business want to retain their customers. They promptly informed that, i will get back the returns in the form of a cheque within 45 days.

After 45 days? Well i started getting more bills... hey come' on i don't have your connection how could u send me a bill? Calling the customer care did not yield anything fruitful. This 3^rd month after cancellation, and yet am getting bills, and now they are sending people to collect the bill at home. Calling on alternate number to pay the bills. This is absurd.

There is no relief yet...

Some clicks from my Panasonic FZ15

A rare beauty.
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Glacier Point at Yosemite, CA, USA
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Sunset at End Point, Manipal, Karnataka, India.

Why change is the only constant?

I am thinking on this from past few days!... ( or was it months?)

How the change is a constant? that was my first thought.
Then i realized life is full of changes... u are born baby... then youth... then mid age...
Yes it seems i have seen a lot from my childhood.
the requirements in childhood would be more of play and study... being first in class or sports! having a cricket match on weekend would be an event which can't be missed out at any cost.

Then comes the Youth...
u would dream of something...having a big car, big Job, perfect companion! great friend circle...
Missing out a party would be a big mistake in this age...

so u have a job , have a great car to drive.... and of course perfect companion.
then what ? r u finished? nope it goes on... to lengths and lengths...

Along with all your personal experiance.... all around you change... the environment changes... the constructions changes... global warmin happens... YES! everything changes.

Oh! i got it... may be its that the change can't be changed! is that y change is the only constant?

well these are few of my thoughts.