Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

In Bangalore. One flat tire. One overturned tanker and traffic jam in the ghats. 12 5 = 17 hours in one seat.

Two hours and I’m on a bus to Bangalore. Two weeks.

Track the mood of LiveJournal (via Danah Boyd).

My postcard system now uses Marker Felt Wide instead of Comic Sans MS. From the Apple fonts page:

Designed by Pat Snyder, art teacher and son of a master sign painter, Marker Felt is exceptional in its combination of casualness with clarity and definition of form. It is particularly useful for giving onscreen presentations to large audiences.

Here’s a sample postcard showing my workplace. Marker Felt is a $11 shareware font. Unfortunately, the only contact information I have is:

Pat Snyder
1797 Ross Inlet Road
Coos Bay, OR 97420

If you are in the neighbourhood of Oregon and can verify the address and send Pat the money, I will send you $11 postage via PayPal.

I’m also evaluating some other free fonts. Font selection support is coming soon.

My PB is now Pantherified. Smoother text, subtler stripes, sharper buttons, snappier response, jaw-dropping graphic stunts...

Was it worth the ~ Rs. 6000 it cost me? I think not. But who cares as long as I get to indulge in revelry, showing off Exposé and Fast User Switching?

Today’s photo-shoot was disappointing: I went to Campal and shot a 360° panorama using 55 images; but when I looked at them on my computer, the images looked terrible because the scene wasn’t worth photographing in the first place. 86 photographs in all today, and most of them wasted.

To compensate, I went digging through my archives for previously unpublished photographs of Goa. Combined with the few good ones today, here are 25 pictures. More »

You can now send any picture from my collection as a postcard. Here’s an example from the recent trip to Karwar.

Postcards are delivered as email attachments, not URLs, so they last forever. The font used is Comic Sans MS. If you have a suggestion for another free True Type font, tell me.

Here's the source code, available under a BSD-like license: part #1,

Read on...

From the Indian Express:

Said the Kanchi spokesman: “His Holiness [the Kanchi Shankaracharya] stresses on effective use of computers... He himself reads and responds to e-mails sent to him by hordes of devotees.” Mutt authorities said the Shankaracharya has got used to video-conferencing with disciples and worshippers living abroad.

Why do I find this so amusing?

Update: Mutt jokes aside, didn’t anyone have a vision of the holy man pausing in the middle of a sloka recital to complain about spam, or to debate the finer points of Microsoft NetMeeting vs. Yahoo! Messenger with a webcam?

You know of how politicians and celebrities frequently retract their earlier statements? Looks like our newspapers do it too sometimes:



This particular news item from the Indian Express has been edited almost every day since it first appeared a few days ago. In one earlier revision, Abhijit Kale’s name was entirely replaced with an anonymous “top cricketer”.

The changes were captured by NetNewsWire, my RSS aggregator, using Aaron Swartz's HTML Diff.

How often do you start writing an email message, intending to attach a document, but end up sending it without the attachment? It used to happen to me almost every single time, until I switched desktop environments, and now I realise I haven’t missed a single attachment in months.

What made the difference?

When using Evolution, the process was: switch to the Evolution window (I rarely shut down my mail client), open a new compose window, start writing the message, click on the Attach button, locate and attach document, click Send. Unfortunately for me, the instinct is to open a new message, write, and send in one continuous motion. The attachment is only remembered afterwards.

Now when using Mail.app, the process is: locate document using the Finder, drag to Mail’s dock icon, wait for a new window to open with the document attached, write message, hit Send. By repositioning the “attach document” step to the very beginning of the process, the “new message, write and send” steps are not interrupted.

Is it even possible to drag a file from Nautilus into Evolution and have a compose window open? Or to do that from the command line with an “evolution /path/to/file”? Now that I think of it, I’ve never even tried! — and I used GNOME for four years before switching.

Of 72 total yesterday, here are 9 regular and 2 panoramic pictures. More »

The panoramic pictures were pieced together using PTMac, an excellent $50 (15 day trial) front-end to the GPLed Panorama Tools. Both panoramas are available in rectilinear projection (JPEG; 120°) and cylindrical projection (QTVR). The first panorama is a 360° projection in QTVR and is well worth the download size (2.7 MB). It was composed of sixteen individual images. The second is just five images and was shot without a tripod.

The vertical bands visible above are the unfortunate result of using a “fully-automatic” camera in the setting sun. It is at times like this I wish I either had a better camera or better image editing skills.

Just got back from Karwar. 222 km total. Photos and update later.

Just finished preparing slides for my “Introduction to Plone” talk at LB/2003. There are forty one slides in all, and only half an hour to present them: time to wield that axe.

I’m going to do a test presentation locally tomorrow to see how long it actually takes (estimate is one minute per slide except for a few complicated slides) and to check that the sequence of slides is in logical order.

I’m also considering dropping my advanced Plone talk because few people are likely to have the required base understanding, and there is no way I can make time for creating slides before this weekend’s deadline.

At 4:30 PM today, I felt like going for a ride, so I put on my helmet and rode southwards, carrying only my wallet and cell phone, dressed in just a t-shirt and shorts.

After about two hours, the sky darkened, the road contorted into steep curves and blind turns as it negotiated the western ghats, and my bottom started to hurt so bad that every kilometre further only added to the burden of another kilometre I had to ride back.

So I stopped at a roadside hotel and asked how much further Karwar was. Thirty five kilometres, the waiter said. I had already done eighty. Go ahead or turn back?

I pondered for a while and called Zubin and said I was on the way to Karwar and would be back in the morning. He asked if I would be back in time for the morning meeting and I confirmed.

Then I did the math: the meeting is at 8:30 AM and the ride is two and a half hours, meaning I had to be on the road by 5:30 AM. Land at Karwar at 7:30 PM, pay good money for accommodation for the night, only to leave at 5:30 in the morning? Didn’t seem like a good idea.

So I rode back 80km to Dona Paula.

Next weekend, I’ll leave early in the day and spend a few good hours at Karwar before returning. And a few weeks later, I will ride all the way to Bangalore, solo.

I just registered a second talk at LB/2003. I’m now going to be doing both the introduction and advanced development with Plone sessions.

Sreekanth and Pramod from Mahiti will be doing an introduction to Zope, and Indic content management (with Plone among others), respectively. fus has registered a talk on RAD with Python.

Between us, we should have a fairly healthy coverage of what Zope is capable of.

In other news, Plone is going to Comdex with O’Reilly. Plone came out first place in the contest with a wide margin.

If you sent me email sometime over the weekend and it bounced, please send it again. My ISP accidentally knocked off my mailbox and I only noticed on Monday afternoon when the usual flood of mail didn’t arrive (I could still login to the mailbox).

I am, of course, switching ISPs. The new box should be up in a week.

PS: I’m back in Goa now.