Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

I brought a camera to the concert too, but they wouldn’t let me take it in. Apparently the rules don’t apply to everyone.

The exhibition has a few nice pictures. It’s worth a visit.

The BLUG is organising a special meeting for the explicit purpose of pinning up dirty laundry and getting it muckier. I’ve been summoned to the proceedings and been asked to conduct myself with grace and rationality. Not wanting to be a sitting duck however, I plan to spend the day absconding, thumbing my nose at them.

See, I understand I’m something of a mini-celebrity these days, but when people plan entire gatherings around my presence without bothering to notify me until the last moment, that is a whole new high.

Will they put up an effigy and throw knives at it?

Last evening, I went to themadman’s restaurant. He showed me his collection of very sharp knives.

What is it with the incessant raving over themadman and kalyan? Two more turned up this week (on Madhu, Kalyan). See, they’ve both done cool things and got their 15 minutes of fame. Enough already! Quit with the drooling. Let them do something far more remarkable before we turn them the spotlight again.

If you must celebrate, can’t you at least stick your neck out and pick someone* no one is raving about yet? What do you get out of beating the drum for someone already well acknowledged for their achievements?

* I was pleasantly surprised to see Tara highlighting kaustubhhere and say_yes04, for example.

I’ve grown to expect that my last name is obscure and will be misspelt every now and then, in a medium where the spelling is immutable. I’ve even a list of the most common misspellings. The Deccan Herald has decided to break with this tradition and somehow get my first name wrong instead. According to them, I’m now Karan Jonnalagadda. *sigh!*

You know those niggling details that you dismiss when you’re getting to know a new person? Those very details get greatly magnified with time. They won’t go away. How do you deal with them?

The new menu at Painted Platters is shaped like a record.

For my upcoming session at Barcamp, I took the last four years of posts and comments stats for bangalore and made a graph. I’ve never made a graph before and took the obvious route of Excel. This is ugly. It hurts my eyes. Can someone make it pretty? mannu? Here’s the excel sheet, raw data (per post, monthly), and source for downloading calendar pages (sh) and parsing into CSV (py). Four posts were backdated (start here); I manually added them to the excel sheet based on the date of the first comment to each. Deleted posts—which were among the most interesting ones—are unfortunately not countable.

The community’s most active period was between May 2004 and May 2005. Comment spikes appear to correlate with post spikes. If both are redrawn to a percentage scale using daily instead of monthly stats, it should be easier to identify the volatile periods. How do I do that in Excel? What charting app should I use?

That huge spike in April 2005 (1209 comments) is clearly the work of our friends at wearesphinx. It should be interesting to relate other spikes with specific events:

• Within the community (above mentioned friends and their brethren),
• Within LiveJournal (invite codes removed Dec 2003, spike from 81 to 236 comments in Jan 2004, remains above 100 henceforth), or
• Elsewhere (Rajkumar dies, riots in Bangalore Apr 2006, 535 comments).

Anyone game for playing tag?

At left, the Linux Bangalore event logo. At right, the United Nations Global Compact program logo. Did one derive from the other? Were they both inspired by another source?

When in Southeast Asia last year, I visited bookstores in each country. The magazine racks were particularly interesting.

In Bangkok, most of the magazines were foreign with their mastheads in English. I took this to mean they were direct imports and bought a couple, only to discover the contents were in Thai with only titles in English. Judging from the visuals, most articles were translated and a few locally produced. There were lots of foreign publications, all of them similarly handled. It appeared there was a thriving industry in translating magazines, with local content production slowly picking up.

In Kuala Lumpur, the magazines were all direct imports in English. There was no local production except a few independent publications that were clearly not up to international standards.

I thought this was rather telling of how the dominance of a language plays itself out. Let me explain.

The Thai language is closer to Chinese than to the Indo-European languages we are familiar with. In Thai, the tone with which a word is pronounced decides its meaning (see tonal languages). In Indo-European languages, intonation changes the type of sentence, usually between statement and question. For example, in English, a rising tone indicates a question, like in “You will come?”, while most Indian languages use a falling tone, like in “You will come-a?” or more likely “You will come, no?” The Thais have as much difficulty comprehending this as we have getting how the very meaning of a word can change with its tone. It is not possible to accurately transliterate Thai into the Roman alphabet because the Roman alphabet does not record tone.

Little wonder then, the Thais have so much difficulty speaking English, even in a tourist friendly place like Bangkok. English is no threat to the Thai language. It’s a curiosity that the foreigners use, and the foreigners have a lot of money, so one might as well indulge in it. Bangkok celebrates being hip with English. Signboards everywhere use it. Magazine titles and captions are all in English. The government encourages further use of the language. The local population couldn’t be more bothered. English is too inconvenient to ever be their primary language.

In Kuala Lumpur, everyone speaks English, with perfectly intelligible accents. It’s their first language (though to be fair, I did meet people who spoke Malay first and English second). The Malay language uses the Roman alphabet, so it’s all the more easier to learn English. The government goes out of its way to defend Malay from English. Signboards everywhere are only in Malay.

In Bangkok, my hostess Ton complained that Thai youth have no global outlook. They’re happy to limit their world to Thailand. In Kuala Lumpur, that was clearly not the case. If the magazine rack suggested anything, it is that Malaysians are so comfortable at being world citizens that their local media—and with that, their cultural traditions—are having a hard time holding up against imports.

I’m reading a World Bank RFP. Among their rules for submissions:

Offeror shall use recycled paper for all printed and photocopied documents related to the submission of this proposal and fulfillment of this contract and shall, whenever practicable, use both sides of the paper.

Two pieces that curiously resonate. Item 1, a gapingvoid cartoon from last week on paranoia management. Item 2, danah boyd (notice capitalisation), also last week, on being notable in Wikipedia.

You have only so much energy. Why not focus it on a problem you have a reasonable shot at fixing?

Yesterday I looked at my iPod mournfully and wished I could record audio with it. That’s the only significant feature missing from an otherwise wonderful device. Add-ons like the $40 iTalk allow recording at a mere 8 kHz. Then I recalled the iPodLinux guys had discovered the iPod was capable of a full 44 kHz, but there was no way to turn it on using Apple’s firmware. iPodLinux did, but only ran on older iPods.

Well, yesterday I went to their site again and found not only was my Photo now supported, there was even a nice point-and-click installer that setup the iPod to dual-boot, without losing any data. I switched.

I can even play Doom on it!

The man dedicates his life to a cause. The Good People applaud him. The man passes on and his fans express solidarity in the only way they know how. The Good People are shocked. They ask why? The fans say this is what the man told them to do they are doing it for the cause. The Good People distance themselves from the fans.

A new generation grows up reading an airbrushed biography, little suspecting it is too perfect to be real.

The Good People bemoan the lack of critical thought in them.

Mourners turned violent in Rajajinagar last evening, apparently because people were working instead of mourning.

Now that their idol is gone, who will they get upset over? Sahana, fellow student at CSCS, thinks they’ll appoint a new candidate. Her wager is Upendra.

Are we in an era where a company is a commodity?

The dog’s not threatening enough, so you may please beware of the cops.

The annual event formerly known as Bhoomi Jathre was staged last Saturday. It was easily the best yet. I stayed all night, took lots of pictures, and made enough of a spectacle of myself that I may be the official photographer next year.

These pictures are not a representative set; they are simply the ones I liked most. Not all groups are included here. For the artists who asked for pictures, I’ll be mailing them out soon. For those who didn’t ask but would like them, please give me your group name and email address.

I made an entry for the event on Wikipedia. It needs working on.

Read on...

Kiran Subbiah is working on an art installation where video is projected on a part of a circular screen. When the camera pans in the video, the projector also pans. He’s achieved this by building a rotating platform for the projector that is controlled by audio, and splicing this audio with the video’s soundtrack in left and right stereo channels.

hoskere heard that there wasn’t a single Kannada rap song around and decided to make amends. His composition is called Auto Soori. It’s about a regular day in the life of an autorickshaw driver.

Globalised enclaves, consumerism and art. What do they have to do with each other?

I extracted GPS tracks and projected them on a map.

Read on...

I discovered 43 Places earlier this evening and have been having a wild time listing all the places I’ve been and want to go. Check out my profile with the nifty map. If you have an account too, link up to me.

Years ago, I had a vague idea for a service that could track and help coordinate travel. I started with recording my own and planned to expand it to track journal posts and pictures. That idea never turned into anything more material, and now 43 Places accomplishes the same and so much more.

Last night I stumbled upon the site of Mr Pumpy, wherein Felix Hude writes about his experiences bicycling around the world. I was immediately reminded of Pete in Cambodia, who cycled from London to Istanbul, and Paul Keller, who was in Bangalore two weeks last November and rode a cycle everywhere.

Heck, it sounds like a good way to get in shape while getting around. If only…

I’ve owned three bicycles in the past decade. I don’t have one now. I’d like to, but am not sure where it’ll fit in my day—each of the previous three exited when my routine changed and they fell into disuse.

Does anyone have a cycle I can borrow for a few weeks?