Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

There is this certain joy in holding a film reel that digital photography doesn’t provide. Maybe it’s with how it curls around itself, how it plays with the light.

Maybe it’s with the incredible amount of physical space it takes up. 36 pictures to a reel versus tens of thousands for the same volume of hard disk space.

Or maybe it’s with how horrendously expensive non-digital photography is. Rs. 85 for a reel of ISO 100 film (100 for ISO 400), Rs. 40 for developing the negatives, and Rs. 190 for a 600 dpi scan. Considering that each frame is just over an inch wide, 600 dpi barely covers the resolution of an average monitor.

But I still see myself experimenting with film in the coming few months.

Update: Some math. My digital cameras have together captured 7043 images in the last one and a half years. If I had used film instead, the cost in film and processing would be 7043 pictures divided by 36 to a reel, multiplied by whole of 85 rupees per reel plus 40 rupees for processing plus 190 rupees for scanning. (7043 / 36) * (85 + 40 + 190) = Rs. 61,625.25. Those cameras have more than paid for themselves. Even the 50k price tag on the D70 seems reasonable. Now if only I was making any money off this.

The last time I read it, Dune left a fire burning for two weeks. How long will it last this time?

I’m experimenting with dad’s Nikon F70—he doesn’t use it anymore now that he has a digital. The lens on this camera is amazing. I’d love to have something like this with a digital camera. The lens has its own CPU!

Dad’s camera bag had two unused rolls expired November 2003 that I’m using for my test shoots. Does anyone know where I can get negatives scanned in Bangalore? Anyone with a drum scanner? And any idea how much it costs?

If there is one thing I’ve learnt in my five years of trying to understand media, it is that when a person says “it cannot be explained in words,” it only means that that person does not understand it well enough to explain it in words.

Rainseed VI on Saturday featured Thermal and a Quarter with Sunil Chandy; Prakash Sontakke with a Hawaiian guitar modified for Hindustani classical music, accompanied by Rahul Pophali on the tabla; and Arun Andrew. Also present was installation art by Vivek Vilasini and Biju Joze.

Details at fatmuttony’s journal.

I went to Landmark yesterday. They said it was Book Day and gave me this plant. The back of the card identifies the source as “Hippocampus Reading Foundation.” It says “The Hippocampus Reading Foundation is a non-profit organization working to foster the reading habit among kids, especially those who are financially less fortunate. Our goal is to get 50,000 under privileged kids to read at least one book every week. This we hope to do over a period of three years.

“For more information, please contact Deborah Gonsalves at 5110 1927 or 98458 68263, or debi@thehippocampus.com”

Suddenly I feel guilty about my huge unread backlog.

Mom’s quite delighted with the plant. She doesn’t have this species in her collection. “How nice of them,” she said. Mom has a long-standing policy at her school of never giving cut flowers, only live saplings.

Yet another publication goes to press. The BioBuilder paper is in this month’s BMC Bioinformatics:

Background
The explosion in biological information has created the need for databases that are easy to develop and maintain and are simple to manipulate by annotators who are most likely to be biologists. However, deployment of scalable and extensible databases is not an easy task, and generally requires substantial expertise in database development.

Results
BioBuilder is a Zope-based software tool that was developed to facilitate intuitive development of protein databases. Protein data can be entered and annotated through web-based forms along with the flexibility to add customized annotation features to protein entries. A built-in review system permits a global team of scientists to coordinate their annotation efforts as was done by our international team during the development of Human Protein Reference Database (http://www.hprd.org). All the data can be exported in extensible markup language (XML) format, which is rapidly becoming as the standard format for data exchange.

Conclusions
As the proteomic data for several organisms begins to accumulate, BioBuilder will prove to be an invaluable platform for functional annotation and development of customizable protein centric databases. BioBuilder is open source and is available under the terms of LGPL.

This is our fourth publication so far on this project.

My balcony in the light of a sodium vapour lamp from across the road. This shot was a bit of a challenge: the light was too dim for the camera’s auto-focus sensor. What I did was use a tube light to temporarily light up the balcony, hold the camera button halfway down so it could focus, switch off tube, and click, with a three second exposure to reproduce the street lamp’s lighting.

The 100% virgin tank is just to the right of this frame.

Remember my post yesterday about the Indian language development project at IIT Kanpur? This is from their Makefile:

# DO NOT DELETE

table.o: /usr/include/stdio.h /usr/include/features.h
table.o: /usr/include/sys/cdefs.h /usr/include/gnu/stubs.h
table.o: /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i586-mandrake-linux/2.96/include/stddef.h
table.o: /usr/include/bits/types.h /usr/include/bits/pthreadtypes.h
table.o: /usr/include/bits/sched.h /usr/include/libio.h
table.o: /usr/include/_G_config.h /usr/include/wchar.h
table.o: /usr/include/bits/wchar.h /usr/include/gconv.h
table.o: /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i586-mandrake-linux/2.96/include/stdarg.h
table.o: /usr/include/bits/stdio_lim.h ./include/defs.h ./include/table.h

There is no configure script. As golisoda says it, just because they are IIT Kanpur doesn’t mean they know what they are doing.

I must take that statement back. Some of this code is excellently written (beyond my abilities at least). However, it’s quite clear that the code is not well tested. In particular, it just won’t build on BSD systems, and my primary development environment is of BSD descent.

The neighbour’s water tank. Text on the right side (obscured by leaves) reads “India’s no. 1 blue tank.”

During sunset today, an impatient cloud demanded the Sun hurry up and get on with it. The Sun did not like this much and sliced the cloud with great shafts of light. Shaft after shaft ripped through until half the sky was dominated by battle debris.

Sadly, I did not get to a camera fast enough.

I’ve been doing some work on ISCII [PDF] and Unicode for Mahiti for about two months now. Last month I wrote a Unicode to ISCII converter in Python as a compliment to Meyarivan’s iscii2utf8.py (the code will be released under a BSD-like license after a little cleaning up).

The idea behind this is that there is a large base of systems out there that are not Unicode capable. For the sake of users with such systems, Mahiti wants to offer two versions of every Indian language page: one in Unicode and one in ISCII—which is an 8-bit standard—using font encoding. CDAC has released several high quality non-Unicode fonts that we are hoping to use.

Now we’ve found another problem: these fonts aren’t ISCII encoded either. They use another encoding called ISFOC, which varies by script—meaning a separate converter for each script. While CDAC publishes a table of characters, their converters are proprietary.

I was almost resigned to making comparison charts and writing converters myself, but Googled around a bit and found that someone’s already added ISFOC support to Emacs. And that’s heartening. If they have conversion tables in Elisp, I can easily convert them into Python. Looked a bit more, and found this tool called iconverter which does conversion at the command line. Iconverter is part of the Linux Technology Development for Indian Languages project at IIT Kanpur. It also appears to be written in C, which means I can now just write a Python wrapper module—if it isn’t already done.

More news as I make progress.

Perhaps humankind’s most fundamental problem—in past, present and future—is ensuring the efficient flow of information. Everything else stems from this.

The fourth in today’s series of posts on media. My apologies if you are not finding this interesting. These thoughts have been sloshing around my mind for several months; they have been long due as words.

How do you get a message out to a local area that is too small for mass media? A few methods come to mind.

1. Messages on the local cable networks. I think it is illegal to insert advertising into someone else’s channel, but several cable operators/networks run their own movie channels.

   Problem: Video production is too expensive for anything but the tackiest adverts, and viewership is volatile. As independent operators merge into networks, their private channels expand until they cover too large an area.

2. Flyers inserted into newspapers. This is pretty effective. Catch the primary newspaper distributor for an area and you can be sure your message will fly around every house as the paper is unfolded.

   Problem: None that I can think of. Perhaps newspaper distributors have political affiliations?

3. Hoardings. In cities like Bangalore, several localities have only one main access road. If you want to get to Bilekhalli, IIMB, Arekere, Hulimavu or Gottigere, the only access is via Bannerghatta Road. Occupy a hoarding on this road, and you can bet everyone in those localities will see it sooner or later.

   Problem: Very expensive.

4. Posters and road signs. Illegal posters on walls and trees are a common tactic, and very effective along narrow roads with slow moving traffic. Your name on a road sign is legal, but you’re paying for the sign’s maintenance, and you get nothing but name and logo.

   Problem: Posters and road signs meant to be read from moving vehicles don’t give much space to make your pitch. All you can hope for is that the name and styling strike a bell.

5. Rotary clubs and other local associations. This is the most unusual of the set. The Rotary has sub-city chapters all over the world. Membership is by invitation only and restricted to achievers from local society. The organisation is part social service oriented and part social networking club. If you can address a Rotary gathering, you’ve got your message across to some of the most respected people in the area, from whom you can expect trickle-down effects. And if your pitch involves benefit to society, they’ll be happy to hear it.

   Local associations such as housing societies have a smaller member base, but better representation: one member from each household. They are also far more interested in issues affecting their surroundings. If you are going to talk about improving the quality of the road leading to their homes, it is of immediate interest to them. They are not acting as unappointed representatives for several people.

   Problem: Way too much effort!

I feel crippled by the lack of statistics tabulating costs for each of these methods against potential reach. The National Readership Survey covers the entire country and is mass media oriented. Are there any studies looking at small areas in detail?

I went to cast my vote today: my first time ever. Noticed that all the candidates were unfamiliar and candidate names on the machine were in Kannada. No English or Hindi. Does Bangalore not have any immigrants who can’t read the local language?

But I’m more concerned about why the candidates were unfamiliar. Why? Because they have no channel to familiarity. There are large gaps in this country’s media coverage. I’ll try to explain.

Let’s start with classifying media by coverage (by type): with examples.

1. National media (television, newspapers and magazines): Zee TV, Times of India, Outlook.
2. Regional media (television, magazines): Sun TV, Eenadu TV, Udaya TV, (magazine?)
3. City media (newspapers, magazines): Times of India, CityInfo.
4. Sub-city media (???): None (Jayanagar Times anyone?)

Now let’s look at the character of content in media.

Newspapers have both national and local coverage. They select material from multiple sources for publication. On a typical front page of the Times of India, one story will be published in all editions across the country, another will be only in the Bangalore edition. Magazines are not like that. A given magazine has the same content in all the areas it is distributed in (except for a few cases like the international editions of some magazines, where the market has clear-cut segments).

National TV is perfectly uniform for the entire covered area. TV also, unlike print, is a medium for conveying culture. A soap opera is not just a story, but also a representation of a particular culture, a particular way of life, even if imaginary. TV has the effect of imposing a common culture across a vast geography, at the exclusion of all else.

The news channels give you the updates from all over India, but do you know what’s happening in Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Burma or Sri Lanka unless it is something exceptional? All these countries are immediate neighbours with vast shared boundaries.

This sort of exclusivity doesn’t always work. Several years ago, Star Plus was an English language channel that played foreign-made shows. Star then decided the channel needed a local character and pretty soon, Star Plus was an all-Hindi channel. Which didn’t go down well South Indian viewers, so the old Star Plus was revived with the new name Star World. But this is an unusual case.

National TV also means national advertising. An advertiser considering TV has two choices. Reach all viewers or reach none. No picking. Advertisers therefore like common culture; they like being able to appeal to all viewers with a single advertising campaign.

Advertisers pay for reach. For example, if a magazine has one lakh readers and charges one lakh for a full page ad, this comes to just Re. 1 per reader. That is cheaper than mailing an envelope to each reader. But does the advertiser really want to reach all those people? Advertisers want focussed audiences, and demand this of media. A magazine could cover everything about computers and be very popular with 10 lakh readers, but an advertiser trying to reach a subset—people interested in a particular thing—just 1 of 10 lakh readers—won’t pay for 9 lakh irrelevant readers. For a medium, being popular is not good enough. Since all media—magazines, newspapers or TV—are sold at far below the actual cost of production, having a focus that advertisers want is what matters. This is what killed magazines like Byte. Focus or die.

This also works in reverse. If the advertiser can’t target consumers of available media, the advertiser has no hope. And that is what ails local politicians. They can’t afford a city-wide newspaper when trying to reach just a locality.

So how does a local politician make himself known? How does he communicate with people of his area? I have no answer for this, but the answer clearly is not in traditional mass media: media production cost is more or less the same for a small audience, but cost per unit for the advertiser is too high.

A few clarifications to the last post. The kind of knowledge I seek is more of an explanation for the current state of media (in the positive sense) and less of a running commentary as things evolve. This means it’s more likely to be found in a book or a university course than in a magazine. And this presents a problem.

The western world—particularly the United States—has been at the forefront of media evolution for well over a century. New observations on consumer preferences are made and reported there, and the necessary changes effected, long before those changes arrive here. But arrive here they eventually do.

The trouble now is, within local media, there is no observation to report, merely the result of the change. To understand what’s going on, I, the media student, must study two reports: observation and results in western media, and results in local media. The report from across the world invariably contains cultural references that I don’t understand.

For example, in Faster, James Gleick points out that baseball has been losing prominence on television because it is not a game that can be hurried along and slotted into a specific timeframe. It doesn’t help that I know nothing of baseball beyond a few movie scenes. I have to mentally substitute baseball with cricket and think of the difference between Test Cricket and One Day International Cricket (and given my interest in the game…). But that’s an easy one; here’s a googly: do you know exactly what a city block is?

I’m reading Faster (#), James Gleick’s excellent chronicle of humankind’s 20th century obsession with time. The book was written in 1999 and therefore misses the Internet almost completely (Gleick pays scant attention to boom-time hoopla). Gleick has however rekindled my interest in understanding the relationship between media and consumers.

The Internet is a bad place for this sort of study: too few users, too little (Indian) media presence, no clear lines binding media and consumers to geographical proximity and associates (culture, society, etc.). It is of course useful for other things like community studies, but I’m not interested in that right now.

I’m therefore looking offline, in either print or television. We don’t have a local equivalent to Folio: magazine and Pradyuman Maheshwari’s late, lamented Mediaah! was more watchdog than study. The information I seek is common knowledge to media planners and editorial boards; hopefully, their insight is also available to the general public.

Current candidates: A&M magazine, AgencyFAQs and MagIndia (but websites are unusable without RSS feeds).

Can you folks recommend anything?

This picture is the last of thirty three attempts at shooting the subject. The lighting (at 10:30 PM) is from an emergency lamp with two small fluorescent tubes (not CFLs) placed about three feet away.

I don’t have a high resolution version, but I do have attempt #32 with context and a little too much light, the same view in daylight, the view from above, and an unrelated bonus picture.

For the sake of this shoot I pulled dad’s old tripod out of the attic, where it had been lying for the last few years. This tripod is really nice. It weighs a couple of kilos, extends to a height of over six feet, and has two spirit levels and really smooth controls for use with a video camera or for panoramic shoots. The picture above wouldn’t have been possible without this tripod.

This pesky fellow has been singing along to my music all morning. He’s completely out of tune and very, very loud. What’s worse, he mistakes all motion for a potential mate and goes into a mad chattering frenzy.

I finally got annoyed enough to take my camera out and shoot him, but now he wants to play hide and seek. He even has the gall to continue singing from behind his branch.

And while I was thus distracted, this fine specimen fluttered by.

So I finally did it yesterday, the thing I’ve always dreaded doing: I bought a book I already have, but haven’t read. Purchase #1 was over two years ago.

Twilight. Another day passes me by. A day filled with opportunity, under-utilised, gone. Darkness seeps the light out of my window. My display is a harsh contrast with the surrounding. Pupils dilate when I look around. Must switch on the light. I look out: it’s not night yet, not day anymore. I’m not tired. I’m thinking of all the things to be done before the day ends. I’m restless. I look back at the day and see how little is done. Darkness bears weight. Darkness crushes the light out of the ambient; sublimates hope.

Twilight depression is descending.

Read on...

I was browsing the latest issue and noticed that almost every story is a person profile: the person behind the success story getting more column space than the business. I’m not sure I like this sort of glorification.

My friend Dr. Gurunandan Bhat, formerly known as gurunandan, has now defected to Movable Type. His new website is Codesutra.net.

Jaipan Teleshoppe on the CCC channel is selling breast enhancement pads with far infrared ceramic vibrators that stimulate hormones for breast growth. The advert came complete with 3D models of ballooning breasts and testimonials from happy users, including a mother-daughter pair.

…

I’m unable to conceive an appropriate tag-line.