Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

There is something about Movable Type that irritates me considerably, but remained elusive until a few minutes ago, when I was over at Jivha.com. Now I know what it is:

1. The commenting system doesn’t support threading, and because of this, there is no reply notification system like LJ has. If I post a comment, I won’t know of any replies unless I visit the page again. And when using an RSS aggregator that doesn’t put everything on one page (i.e., uses a multi-paned interface and highlights unread posts), I’m very unlikely to revisit a post.

2. I can’t reply to another comment; only to the main posting. If I want to indicate I am replying to a comment, I have to quote context. By placing the burden of establishing context on the reader, MT is likely to be discouraging several readers who would have otherwise participated in the discussion.

3. Even if I visit the main page again, I can’t tell which posts have new comments. On LJ this isn’t a problem because LJ provides the option of appending an &nc=xx tag to the URL, where xx is the number of comments. Browsers will treat this as an unread link and display it differently.

4. The default templates display comments in a new window. I absolutely hate web interfaces that (a) force-open new windows and (b) insist on a custom size for the window that is not the same size as the existing window.

Given these, I’ll warrant an assumption of what type of users each weblogging app/service attracts:

Movable Type is for the “messiah preaching to the masses” types, who would rather not have readers talking to each other.

LiveJournal is for those who value their community of friends (notice: not “readers”) more than the presentation of their journals.

Blogger is dead technology. With their current pace of feature upgrades, in about a couple of years, the only users they will be left with are those who don’t care for better, or don’t have enough of a clue on how to migrate.

Most of the other weblogging services and applications will be roadkill in a couple of years, unless they move on to newer concepts like photo weblogs (a.k.a “moblogs”) or take to serving niche communities.

Another card that Gulnar sent to everyone at Synapse...

Read on...

Sticky notes are possibly the best project management tool around. And a special message for my colleagues at IoB.


I use ‘o’ to indicate a task, ‘x’ for a completed task, ‘ø’ for a task that cannot be completed because of external conditions, and ‘…’ for a continuation of the previous line. This scheme works better for me than any to do list management tool I’ve used, and I’ve used lots.

Another thing that works in favour of sticky notes: the window lacks unnecessary space consuming decorations and can be easily resized and positioned in a corner of the screen where it is always visible. Try, for example, doing that with a to do list attached to your calendar application or a conventional editor like Microsoft Word.

I’ve been struggling since morning to get a decent version of Python running on Red Hat 8 so that I can use Zope 2.6.2. The Python 2.2.1 that Red Hat ships segfaults with Zope.

This is a task that should be as simple as rpm -Uvh. I’ve been at it for over six hours now...

Give me my Debian any day!

Back in Goa. An epiphany needs careful replay so it may be re-expressed in words. The past week was probably the most significant in all of this year.

The new year’s resolutions, one and a half weeks in advance:

Less of me and more of around me. Today’s communications today, not tomorrow; the right medium for the right effect. More knowledge sharing. Stability in the daily schedule.

The Unknowns are easily Bangalore’s best live rock act. They played at Layout/Hideout in HSR Layout Friday night.

Oh, and if you are ever in the place, keep off the food. The service sucks. I order a Mushroom Manchurian and get a Chicken Manchurian. The guy then takes twenty minutes to bring me the right dish, and it’s cold. He takes it back, returns in a few minutes, and it’s still cold. Next round it’s slightly lukewarm, and I’m really hungry, so I don’t bother to ask for it to be warmed again. I order a Orange Juice, and he gets me a Mango Juice, the syrupy version that comes out of a Maaza or Slice bottle. Finally when I pay my bill, the guy doesn’t return the change. I had no intention of leaving a tip.

The music more than made up for it. A tip of the hat to killapop, the band’s manager, who handled negotiations with the waiter, and to irq2, for the ride home.

This text is just filler for the metadata attached to this post.

I’ve found three guys I want to work with, and all three are interested in working with me.

The future looks good. Expect serious activity in three to six months.

An individual has only 24 hours in a day. A team, by definition, does not have such a restriction since the definition of a team does not specify a fixed size.

I’m struggling to make the transition from an individual to a team.

I wish I could find the words to explain what is on my mind.

Cheerful and utterly incapable of expressing thoughts, vocally or verbally. Must read some nice fiction to undo the block. Howard Rheingold is one smart guy. This song makes me want to dance.

Stay in Bangalore extended to Saturday.

Why is life with Red Hat 9 a pain in the hind side?

My LB/2003 slides are online now.

I’m still in Bangalore and less three kilos.

Day #1 (Wed, Dec 3):
Fever at over 103F. Doc gives me a poke in the bum and tablets for two days. Missed day #2 of LB/2003.

Day #2 (Thu, Dec 4):
Fever’s gone. I dress up and shower, intending to attend the Zope 3 Sprint starting today, but by 9:00 AM I find myself too weak to go anywhere. Sneezing fit starts. By the end of the day, I’m down to the bottom of a 100-pull box of tissues, still sneezing. Missed both day #1 of the Zope 3 Sprint and day #3 of LB/2003.

Day #3 (Fri, Dec 5):
Sneezing is in control but not fully stopped. Now I’m weak from having barely eaten the last two days. My nose has two stripes on it from where the sneezing ripped the skin off. Skip day #2 of the Zope 3 Sprint. By evening, my tongue starts to get bitter, meaning it’s time to eat something no matter what it feels like. Kishore and I head to Adiga’s in Arekere, where I have a khara bath and a bhel puri, both hopefully being easy on the stomach. An hour later, contents of stomach find their way to the sink. I feel much better, suddenly find myself able to run up and down stairs. I had to struggle to keep my balance earlier in the day. Mom and Dad return from Mysore just then. Mom looks at tummy and says it’s gas, not obesity. I happily agree. Skip dinner because I have trouble eating.

Day #4 (Sat, Dec 6):
Wake up with a clear head and unrestricted breathing. No more sneezing, but lots of phlegm. Looks like I will be able to attend the LJ meet today. Back to work for now.

I’m running a temperature of 103F. Time to see a doctor.

It’s a cold Wednesday morning. It was a cold Tuesday night. I slept fully clothed under a thick blanket, and woke up with a bad headache and an odd pain in the chest that doesn’t appear to be bronchitis.

Looks like I’m missing the first few talks of the morning.

Jim Fulton, the Pope of Zope, is in Bangalore. He is not speaking at LB/2003. I don’t know why and no one I asked seems to know either. Two explanations I’ve got so far, both from people who are not managers, is that “it would be inappropriate” and “there was no free slot for him”. Both reasons sound like bullshit to me.

Jim is here for a Zope 3 Sprint starting from the 4th, in two sessions of five days each. I’m attending between the 4th and the 10th. I was under the assumption that the sprint is going to be a tour of the Zope 3 architecture, until Sathya Rangaswamy of ZeOmega (who are sponsoring the sprint) forwarded a message from Jim with this link and this message: “I will likely make comments on code that people create and will expect people to adjust their code in response to the comments before progressing.”

We’re going to be writing code? Another message yesterday: “Please download the following form and have it filled out for jim to collect before the sprint”

The form is titled “Zope Contributor Agreement for contributing to the Zope Source Repository”. Does this mean that by the end of the sprint, I’m going to be an official Zope 3 developer? Sounds like fun.

Just got back from LB/2003. Great people, great talks; time well spent. This is my second time at LB (I wasn’t in Bangalore this time last year).

My slides will be online in a couple of days; I’m switching servers this week.

Bangalore is cold. I was wearing three layers of clothes and was still chilled out. By evening I had what felt like a fever, a headache, cough and a sore throat. The ride back home after dinner with bluesmoon and mannu added watery eyes and a jitter that refused me passage over the official speed limit barrier.

Bangalore traffic totally, completely, absolutely sucks. It is the acme, the pinnacle, the apogee of suckiness. But I know I’ll change my mind and call it the same next year. mmk describes it well when he says “the pedestrian art of raising hands to wade through traffic” — I’ve started to indulge in it too.

Tomorrow I’m going to wear gloves, a thick jacket, and Kishore’s helmet (mine is in Goa).

Other notes:

It was great meeting bluesmoon (three years), thaths (two years; no more ponytail; great talk), teemus a.k.a Sumeet “Slipstream/VirusLabs” Mulani (first time), pooja (also first time), and the regular BLUG gang (nearly four months). Did I miss anyone?

Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman practically 0wn the audience when they are on stage. There’s a lot to learn there. Harald Welte, who hacks on the Linux NetFilter (iptables) module, runs Debian PPC on a PowerBook. He says he had an iBook before and has a dual-G4 desktop, but has no experience with Mac OS X. I briefly considered installing Debian PPC on mine just for the hack value, asked if he had ISO images handy (he didn’t), then realised that as a non-kernel-hacker, I had no use for a Linux kernel: all the apps I need run on Darwin anyway (except Mono, which doesn’t support PowerPC yet; I’m going to ask why in Nat and Miguel’s talk tomorrow).

Sirtaj Singh Kang is promising to do a lot of Python in tomorrow’s RAD with KDE talk. Guess where I will be sitting?

It bothers me so to see Bangalore bursting at the seams. But what can be done? The city's fate is an unfortunate fallout of its success, and of the failure of every other place that lost people to here. I’m standing at a traffic junction waiting to be picked up, and the sight of unfinished construction brought to life in the lighting of hurried traffic, but dampened by the cold, is an unusual and unique experience.