Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

analysis

1. an investigation of the component parts of a whole and their relations in making up the whole
2. the abstract separation of a whole into its constituent parts in order to study the parts and their relations [syn: analytic thinking] [ant: synthesis]
3. a set of techniques for exploring underlying motives and a method of treating various mental disorders; based on the theories of Sigmund Freud; "his physician recommended psychoanalysis" [syn: psychoanalysis, depth psychology] [also: analyses (pl)]

paralysis

1. loss of the ability to move a body part [syn: palsy] [also: paralyses (pl)]

analysis paralysis

1. the inability to convert thought into action

Definitions for analysis and paralysis courtesy WordNet. More on Analysis Paralysis.

What is reputation? How is it created?

Sunil and I were in an autorickshaw on the Western Express highway around 8:30 PM last night, on the way from Goregaon to Bandra. The auto’s brakes failed at a red light and we went through three columns of highway traffic before crashing into two bicycles on the other side.

Total damage: two bicycles with rear wheels bent out of shape. Two bicycle riders thrown off their bikes. One autorickshaw with unusable brakes. Not a scratch on us!

It happened all too quickly for any sense of shock: one second we were speeding toward a red light, next second we were across three columns of traffic with a bicycle under the front wheel and two riders on the road. A minute later, we were looking for another autorickshaw to take us the rest of the way.

premshree and I are in the Virar fast train as I type this. I’m uploading pictures from today’s LJ meet. Being online from a moving train is a unique experience. Andheri is about 40 minutes from Churchgate. The last time I was on this route, about five years ago, the only way to spend the time was by either breathing down someone’s neck, or reading a book. Now I’m going to be online the whole distance, and everybody around me is going to be staring at my screen throughout.



The second picture above is my current wallpaper. Hari brought along his camera too and took some pictures. I’ll upload those later when I’m back at his place. More »

Update: I didn’t post this from the train after all. LJ’s Santa cluster was in read-only mode for the same period that I was on the train. I’m back at Hari’s place now. I just remembered that this day, five years ago, was my first day at Chip magazine, at the company that later came to be called Jasubhai Digital Media, and now publishes Digit. How time flies!

I’m in Versova at quizling’s place right now. It took me two and a half hours to get here from Belapur. I grossly underestimated Bombay’s size when deciding to stay at Ronnie’s place. Hari and I are meeting for the first time in over three years. We’re going to finish with lunch and head for the LJ meet.

Thanks to the five hours a day spent travelling to and fro the last two days, I haven’t managed to write any of the code I was supposed to have (replication between several Zope servers, with no single node designated master). I hope the shorter travel time from Andheri to Goregaon will mean I finish with this code by Wednesday (it needs to be in production use this weekend).

I spent most of today taking photographs. These images do little justice to the actual experience of being here, but what is lacking in quality, I hope I’ve made up for in quantity. Here are 52 of 80 photographs. More »

Mahiti is sharing a stall with the Digital Empowerment Foundation. charlesj and I went there after finishing with the photographs, and then spent several hours unsuccessfully trying to upload via Reliance. Throughput was approximately one megabyte per hour.

The Media Centre here has over 130 computers, all running Debian Linux (kudos to G. Nagarjuna of the Bombay LUG and HBCSE/TIFR), but I wasn’t allowed to use their facilities because I’m not a media person. bluesmoon then offered to let me upload from his house in Bandra, and I was preparing to leave, when I discovered the IndyMedia centre and a Wi-Fi logo. Joy. Shekhar Krishnan got me on the network, and the pictures went online at one megabyte every five seconds.

I’m sitting in bus number 505 (Belapur to Bandra station) and checking email. 112 new messages since last evening.

I’m typing this sitting in the open air at the World Social Forum, online via Reliance. Sunil (golisoda) calls this the Khumbmela of NGOs.

I leave Synapse this evening to join the ranks of the unemployed once more. It is time to crank up seacrow again. To start with, I’m looking for projects that will keep me significantly engaged for between six months and two years. If you think your company may be interested, here is my résumé. My strongest interest is in Web applications and communities.

I’m travelling for the next two weeks, first to Bombay, then Hyderabad. Here is my travel plan. If you are in either area and want to meet up, leave a comment here or call/mail me.

Once back in Bangalore, I will clean up the core of my Media Server project and include it in the CMF Collective. In particular, I want to migrate it to Plone 2 and improve the image management functionality, so that it can be used to effortlessly build a small community oriented photography site (the project won't be in the league of super-scalable systems like fotobilder; my focus is more on effortless install and retrievability than scalability).

Hierarchy is humanity’s substitute for knowledge. When you don’t know what to do, you find the human who knows what to do and cling on tight. Clueless humans will build hierarchies of (apparently) knowledgeable humans to think, decide and act on their behalf.

The enemy of hierarchy is widely distributed knowledge.

The Fontainhas festival of arts is currently underway in Panjim. The festival is a series of galleries along the street in an older part of the city.

While browsing from gallery to gallery today, I saw a most unusual sight: a television in a corner of the room playing Cartoon Network. Why would an art gallery be showing Cartoon Network? It didn’t make sense. A couple of galleries later, another television, playing a soap opera; a girl plonked in a comfortable chair, her back to us. She peers around nervously as we enter, then goes back to her television.

We walk around the room, looking at the exhibits one at a time, until I find myself looking at a table. A workman’s table, with tools neatly arranged on it. An exhibit? Can’t be, it’s too practical, like someone actually uses these tools. And yet, it’s too neatly arranged to be a work table. Puzzling. As we walk out, the girl gives us another nervous look. And then it occurs to me that...

... this isn’t an art gallery, this is someone’s house!

Next door, the exhibits are sharing space with a tailor’s table. As we move on, understanding dawns. The entire festival is being held in people’s houses along the street. Real people who live here have given up part of their drawing rooms for the exhibits. Behind each closed door and curtain is a family holding on to private space, while total strangers walk around their houses.

I’m dazed.

I was walking back to work this evening when I saw this bonfire. The flames were tantalising; I just had to run in and take out the camera.



This was a fairly difficult subject to deal with because my camera is practically useless in the dark, and I’m used to taking several seconds to frame a picture before shooting. This fire wouldn’t allow that. I had to shoot several in quick succession, frequently switching exposure compensation values (the only control my camera offers, apart from zoom). Of 15 pictures, 4 were worth uploading.

Pictured here are Vijay and Rajesh feeding dried leaves to the flames, and three more pictures.

Kumar Chiplunkar and I rode down to Palolem beach today. We had been discussing a trip to Karwar since my last ride and finally set out today, then decided mid-way that Palolem would be a more interesting destination.



We left Dona Paula around 2:40 PM, reached Palolem 4:20 PM, and stayed till 8:30. The ride was about 74.5 km one way, 149 km total. Of 72 photographs, here are 19. Thirty four went into a 360° panorama, but my copy of PTMac has long since expired and I can’t justify the $50 shareware fee. Besides, I don’t have the patience right now to align so many images. Kumar’s offered to do it instead using a Windows front-end to Panorama Tools (Kumar is an artist and works mostly with Photoshop and CorelDraw). More »

My primary motivation for making this trip was to check if two people could ride comfortably over long distances. thaths and I are planning to ride from Goa to Bangalore this month-end, and Thaths doesn’t have a bike. Can two people manage such a distance on a single bike? The answer is yes. I found no difference in the bike’s pickup and handling during the ride, and Kumar was great company. He took over the controls for a while and I found the back seat more comfortable, but the view a little dull. Kumar had trouble adjusting to the 1-down-4-up gear shift pattern, and a mistake in the ghats can be fatal, so I took over again.

On the ride back, I found myself comfortably doing 60 kmph in the ghats. I observed how reliant I was on my brakes responding exactly the way I expect them to. What if they respond a tad slower or sharper? I would’t want to be riding with me when that happens.

There is a stretch of Eucalyptus trees on NH17 in Nirmal Ghat. These trees have smooth trunks and grow to be pretty tall, about the height of a three or four-storey building. While we were in this stretch on the way back (around 9 PM, in the dark), a car overtook us and brightly illuminated the trees. The resulting visual was tremendous. Try to picture this: darkness, cold air, illumination from below, really tall trees, clear channel in between, really short car. Eerie? Someday, I’m going to go back there with a high quality camera and wait in the dark for a passing vehicle.

The trouble with tracking a 100 journals is that I can only go back to about two days of old posts looking for new comments. Beyond that there is just too much to read.

And so I miss a fair bit of interesting commentary.

I don’t think a watch list that sends email updates is a good idea. I don’t want to add something permanently to a watch list and then have to take it off later (and putting anything from news in such a watch list would be sheer madness). No, sir. The ideal watch list would be like the Friends page itself, except it shows only “watched” posts and takes posts off after about 75 entries (just like the current Friends page).

This month’s First Monday has some interesting reading:

• “Do Web search engines suppress controversy?” —Susan L. Gerhart (#)
• “Spinning yarns around the digital fire: Storytelling and dialogue among youth on the Internet” —David Huffaker (#)
• “Altruistic individuals, selfish firms? The structure of motivation in Open Source software” —Andrea Bonaccorsi and Cristina Rossi (#)
• “Globalization of prurience: The Internet and the degradation of women and children” —Indhu Rajagopal with Nis Bojin (#)

Looks like I will have a fully engaged weekend.

If intellectual masturbation is your game, there is an orgy in progress at the Chip-India Blogs. Ponder the depths of such thoughts as:

• Can Bangalore emulate Silicon Valley?
• Linux needs to get real
• The war for India’s software soul

Human protein reference database as a discovery resource for proteomics

The rapid pace at which genomic and proteomic data is being generated necessitates the development of tools and resources for managing data that allow integration of information from disparate sources. The Human Protein Reference Database (http://www.hprd.org) is a web-based resource based on open source technologies for protein information about several aspects of human proteins including protein–protein interactions, post-translational modifications, enzyme–substrate relationships and disease associations. This information was derived manually by a critical reading of the published literature by expert biologists and through bioinformatics analyses of the protein sequence. This database will assist in biomedical discoveries by serving as a resource of genomic and proteomic information and providing an integrated view of sequence, structure, function and protein networks in health and disease.

Read the full text here.

A few weeks ago in Bangalore, Jim Fulton and I went to an evening of Hindustani and Carnatic music in the Bangalore Habba.

The second performance of the evening was a veena recital by Chitra Lingam and group, featuring the veena, ghatam and mrudangam. I’ve heard enough mrudangam music in marriage halls to last a lifetime, but with the veena and ghatam, that evening was my first. I fell in love instantly. Jim said the experience was like listening to rock ’n roll in his time.

A request: do you know where I can get the Chitra Lingam experience on CD? Or if that is unlikely, any veena artistes you can recommend?

I just came back from a Kingfisher sponsored concert featuring the UK fusion band Joy.

The formula for the concert was something like this:

1. Create an innovative beat about 10 seconds long.
2. Play this beat in a loop for 5 minutes.
3. Have the female singer go “aaaaaaahaahaaahahahoooooh” at random intervals.
4. Shine spot lights into the air and into the audience in a pattern out of sync with the music.
5. Have a dancer in a traditional Indian costume perform a traditional Indian dance; except, she appeared to be jumping around randomly in the work of a designer who’s never seen the real thing; something like how the average western illustrator represents the average Indian topless and turbaned. Note to designer: traditional Indian dance costumes do not leave the midriff exposed.

The cover band, Archies, was much better.

This greeting is the best I’ve received this new year. Thanks sarvesh!

I just tried playing some MP3s on my machine via a Windows 2000 machine across the room that has big speakers attached. WinAmp could play most but couldn’t access a couple. I checked the permissions and they were all right. Then I realised the file paths had non-ASCII characters in them (I was trying to play Noir Désir and Afro Celt Sound System’s Éireann), and Mac OS X’s HFS filesystem stores names in UTF-8, while Windows uses Latin-1. The tab key completion in bash says the name is “Noir De\314\201sir”, which looks like UTF-8 to me.

In the Windows file open dialog, “Noir Désir” appears correctly in the file listing, but as “Noir De´sir” in the path drop-down. I can add the file to the playlist in WinAmp, but WinAmp can’t access the file. I thought the problem may be with Samba, but smbclient can access it just fine.

Does this mean that Windows 2000 can’t handle Unicode in the filesystem?