To answer all the questions pouring in

And the meeting is at 4:30pm, on Saturday, the 29th of April.

It is at the HP office, at

Shezan Lavelle
No 15,Walton Rd, B’lore-1
Landmark :close to Airlines hotel
Conference room is on the 1st floor.

There are no pre-conditions for attending – you just be there at the appointed hour and attend.

Read the rest of this entry…

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.”
-Nietzsche

It’s been 7 years this last month since my BBS – CiX – shut down in March 1999, after running for almost a decade (it went live 1-Dec-1989, as India’s first online service of any sort).

During those years, many online friendships were formed, and occasionally we used to meet in real life (IRL) as well. Those meets were called “CiX Meets”, and were quite popular. Here are some pictures from some of those meets, and people.

Many of us are still in touch, but there is an equally large number of CiX members who have never seen each other face to face.

I wonder where everyone is? What are they doing now?

Would anyone be interested in a CiX meet? Say sometime this month or in May?

Small group or large, let’s meet up one evening somewhere, quaff some beers and gobble some samosas, and talk about times gone by, like old (wo)men, and renew old friendships, exchange addresses and rave about one’s children, pets and latest bee in the bonnet.

If you are interested, please write to me (you know the address – if not, use the contact form).

Happy Birthday, Gaurav!

Now the years are rolling by me
They are rocking evenly
I am older than I once was
Younger than I’ll be, that’s not unusual
No, it isn’t strange
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same

–The “missing verse” from “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel

I will be participating in the BarCamp Chennai on the 8th and 9th of April (this Saturday and Sunday). I will be joining the event after my review meeting at the NRC-FOSS.

I will be giving a talk on “Mobile Computing – Moving Beyond PCs”. This is a topic very close to my heart, and this will be the first time that I will be speaking on this subject publicly (though I have been writing about it for years).

Chennai has some of the savviest audiences anywhere in the country, and used to be our favourite seminar venue when Kishore and I were on our datacomm and Internet seminar tours in the 1990s. I look forward to meeting a lot of old (and new) friends there.

Heh – and my brother just advised me to pack some Electral. Apparently, Chennai is hot!

Today is the 16th birthday of my daughter, Geetanjali (whom we call Anjali, or just “brat” for short .

In 1978, when I was 16, I was a year away from meeting the girl who would eventually become my wife, already knew what I wanted to do in the future (my facination with electronics, and eventually computers, was already very strong then) and was hell-bent on learning the guitar, so that I could perform on stage. The next two years were probably the most important and formative ones in my life.

Today, 16 years after that squalling, screaming, bright red bundle of humanity (we nicknamed her “tomato”) appeared on this planet, Anjali is on the verge of completing her 10th standard, and will be looking at the same important two years of her life.

But how different things are for her!

She lives in a world that has opportunities and facilities that my generation could have only dreamt of (and for the record, we did). Computers (or more correctly “the internet”) give her access to information, cultures and even people that were impossible to get at even a few years ago.

The challenges she faces are not those of getting the information, but being able to sift through it, understand it and use it. The challenge is not *how* to reach someone, but *whom* to reach and *why* – given today’s technology, it is as easy for her to communicate with her grandmother in Germany, as with her friend next door.

Schools don’t rely on textbooks anymore – homework assignments assume internet access. Classmates don’t meet in study groups anymore – they chat on instant messenger, never leaving their homes.

And yet, for her, the most enjoyable part of her birthday was not the greetings and the shoutouts she was getting online, but the sleep-over she had with some of her closest friends – face to face, real human contact.

This is probably one of the greatest challenge she will face as she goes on – how to create and maintain the humanity in relationships, in a world that makes it possible to never leave your home or meet someone in real life to stay in touch.

And there is another important lesson she must never forget:

No matter what your chronological age is – to your parents, you are always 8 years old.

Happy Birthday, Anjali

And no, you can’t have the car keys.

And so we have another BLUG meet this Saturday (the 25th of March). Details are here.

This meet will be different, because after a long time, technical talks return to the BLUG meets, albeit in a very different from those in 2003/2004.

Instead of long, complicated and detailed talks, these will be short (15 minute) talks, that will rapidly cover some FOSS technology or product. The purpose is two-fold:

1. Identify potential speakers for future external BLUG events
2. Spread some FOSS tech lovin’

The first one is sorely needed. Too many people these days assume that just because they can boot of a Linux CD, they are great and effective speakers. In fact, they can achieve quite the opposite – by speaking ineffectively, and getting your facts wrong, you can actually harm your cause more than support it. We have had plenty of examples of that in recent times.

The idea is to get new blood into the speaking stream, and make sure they are effective. We will be doing that by discussing each talk after it completes, not just in terms of content, but also in terms of delivery.

The second one is what the BLUG is all about, after all.

If you have never attended a BLUG meet before, maybe you should consider coming to this one. It’s all very informal, and lots of fun.

As always, there are no formalities – just show up. Details are on the announcement page.

p.s. The logo you see on the top right of this post is *not* the official BLUG logo – it is just one I like There are lots more to choose from here. As with the FOSS.IN logo, this one too is designed by friend Harikrishnan.

Now that we safely past the 20th of March, I can answer an open question from an earlier post – who was that friend who presented me the new camera?

That friend was Harald Welte, who was in India from end February to the 20th of March, on a holiday with his fiancee, Elisabeth. I was sworn to silence, so that he didn’t have to turn down the usual tons of invitations from geek groups, companies and tons of other people.

Harald, whom I first met during Linux Bangalore/2003, and who has become a really close friend, is facinated with India – and loves Bollywood movies and Indian food. Elisabeth studies India at the University in Berlin, and this was her first trip to the subject of her studies! You should have seen the look on my driver’s face when she spoke to him in Hindi!

They appear to have had a good time here, especially on their 12-day Kerala trip, thanks to Swati Sani, whose timely intervention made it happen, after initial delays and goofups (and brain-dead travel agents) almost aborted that trip.

I have been taking gadzillions of photos with the new camera, and should start uploading some of them now. Will do that once I finish the revamp of this site.

I finally dumped my homebrew system at COMversations.com, and replaced it with WordPress. I have also started moving some older articles into that system, and am generally playing around with things, in preparation for the big shift on my personal site as well. Because tehre are so many people linking to various parts of my sites, I have to find some way to gracefully avoid “link breakage”.

Last minute heads-up:

You have till 9:45pm tonight to send and SMS saying “RCL B” to 7007 to vote for Phenom as one of the top bands in Bangalore. If they are selected, they get to play on Palace Grounds on the 17th!

Vote now!