Been hard at work reorganising things, preparing to launch a personal project I have been working on for a while. This project will allow me to focus on areas of interest that I am currently unable to address in any meaningful fashion.

This requires me to make changes in several places, including my websites (no, don’t go looking for stuff – the changes are internal for now), doing a rather incredible amount of writing, meeting with and talking to a huge number of people, etc.

My eye-sight problems continue to persist, but I am beginning to live with them. No pain or inflammation – that’s completely under control – but the vision on the right eye is still unusable. The left eye is hanging in there.

As my doctors at St.Johns Hospital tell me, it will take time and nature to heal and correct stuff – I have faith in that.

Well, I don’t have any choice, either, do I?

Due to the recovery process, and the huge amount of stuff I need to do, I am mostly at home these days. Once I get back from Delhi, that should change, though. I went to office today for Gopi’s birthday party, and there were some strange looking people sitting in the cubicles! Some of them were very camera conscious!

A good number of things are beginning to fall in place for me workwise as well, which is very encouraging. More about this over the next few weeks.

This Friday is the next Bangalore Linux User Group Meet – this time the topic is OpenSource Databases – a very important topic especially here in India. A call for speakers produces an amazing number of offers to speak – now that’s the spirit!

My only worry is – will people attend the meet or ditch us and go for “The Matrix Reloaded” instead?

People who care will know where the priorities lie.

I have been working on the PDA friendly section of my site (http://atulchitnis.net/pda).

So far, it just allowed people to pick up the last few diary entries with their PDAs, using services like Avantgo or applications such as Plucker.

PDA usage is booming, and services that cater to PDAs are popping up every day. Just about every site worth its salt now has support for this, and I am hoping that eventually the “/pda” becomes a default option everywhere – it would make life so much easier for many people.

I didn’t realise just how many people were using my /pda section (also aliased to /palm for us hard-nosed PalmOS fans until I recently checked my server logs and saw that there is substantial traffic there every day!

Designing content for mobile devices can be a nightmare if you don’t have the necessary infrastructure – luckily I do, since most parts of my site are database driven anyway, so it is essentially just a bit of reformatting.

But there are also other requirements – PDAs are typically short on memory, low on resolution and often don’t even have colour, though things are changing a lot on those fronts.

Delivery of content has to be kept in mind as well – typically, a PDA users sync the content to their PDAs and disconnect from the net, to read the stuff offline later. It is important then to make sure that there are no broken links or missing content, because the user will not be able to connect back while reading the pages.

That is why I will try and add a little more content to my /pda section, not just teh diary, but also my most recent articles and other information that a normal web-visitor would easily have access to.

All this is part of a larger project of mine, that I have been working on for a while and that I hope to see become reality over the next couple of months.

For now, if you use a PDA, and have an Avantgo account, feel free to subscribe to my /pda channel by clicking here. Note: Avantgo limits such “custom channels”, so it is essentially first come first served.

If you use Plucker, then essentially you just have to tell it to pick up stuff from http://atulchitnis.net/pda.

And if you have a /pda channel yourself, drop me a line!

This note is for the many people who have been writing to me, asking how I am.

I am at home, recovering from a severe Anterior Uveitis that has (hopefully temporarily) sent my right eye out for lunch. The inflammation is under control, thanks to the excellent treatment I received, and right now it is primarily treatment and waiting for something to happen.

The trouble started on April 27th, when I started feeling pain in the right eye. My GP tried treating it with eye drops, but things quickly got worse, and by the 29th I started losing sight in the eye. Luckily, my GP is not the “chip-on-the-shoulder” kind of doctor, and quickly referred me to specialists, which eventually led me to Dr.Colin Nazareth and his team at St.John’s hospital.

Some common questions quickly answered – no, I am not totally blind. My left eye is functioning and carrying the brunt, but you should try picking up a glass of water without the benefit of stereo vision!

And yes, I can work – in the sense that I am in bed, working on my notebook. Thanks to the Internet, I am not cut off from work, so I am getting stuff done.

The timing for this incident couldn’t have been worse – it killed a seminar of mine scheduled for next week, killed any plans to make Shubha’s birthday on the 11th something special and killed any holiday plans (Anjali and Shubha aren’t going to forgive me for this – we were supposed to go to Ooty around the 24th for 4-5 days). The latter happened because my doctors do not want me to travel by road or go anywhere where I cannot get prompt treatment in case of an emergency.

I do have to travel to New Delhi, where I have been invited by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to speak on OpenSource and eGovernance at their event on the 27th and 28th of May. The focus of the event is “Media as a Partner in the Development Debate & Free and Open Source Software”, and there are a number of well known speakers participating, including my old comrade-in-arms Kishore Bhargava (who will be speaking on Low Cost Computing for Education). Hopefully, the organisers will get our talks back-to-back, allowing us to do our familiar AC-KB ping-pong talk that we used to do in the 90′s. I absolutely enjoy giving talks with Kishore!

I just hope that my eye improves by then!

In the meanwhile, I have been spending my time writing, and I am amazed how much I have been able to put together these past few days.

I also acquired a new PDA during this period, but that will be subject of another bout of writing soon.

Finally, many many many thanks to the people who have been SMSing me, calling me, writing to me and even visiting to enquire about my health. I am seriously humbled seeing how many friends I have! This really contributed a lot to my getting better! I even had Phenom dropping in for an impromptu jam session in the basement! Talk about Music as medicine!

Today is Shubha‘s birthday. In the more than 23 years that I have known her (and more than 16 years that I have been married to her), I have always tried to make this a special day for her – spending weeks, sometimes months, agonising over what to do on this day to make her feel special. Last year I even managed to give her diamonds.

Sadly, this year has witnessed a combination of circumstances that have made it impossible for me to make this day as memorable for her as in past years.

But at the very least, I have this space where I can type these words:

Happy Birthday, Shubha!

I Love You!

Am currently at home, nursing a bad eye infection. Not the “Madras Eye” kind of thingy, or conjunctivitis – apparently something more complicated than that. Let us leave at the fact that I now appreciate the ability to see with both eyes a whole lot more.

Had to finally do some stomping on the BLUG Mailing lists to get people to behave like decent list citizens. As usual, hollow cries of “democracy in ruins”, “dictator” and similar stuff can be heard all around. Ah well, part of the job, I guess.

Monday’s storm in Bangalore managed to wreck havoc – especially for me at home. More details after I peruse my insurance policy….

Yesterday was the Bangalore Linux Users Group April meet. To whip things up a bit, Gopi, Shanu and I decided to present part of our upcoming Exocore Wireless Networking Workshop (in May) at the meet – specifically an Intro to Wireless Networking, Wireless Networking and Linux, and practical demonstrations of setup and procedures.

We expected some mild increase in interest, but 104 people in a hall meant for about 60 is a bit more than a “mild increase”.

IAC, the presentations went of very well, with Gopi “Zapping Them with Science” (tm, Hindustan Lever), giving them enough CSc fundas to be dangerous, then me bringing in the Linux part of it, and finally Shanu cakewalking through demos and setups. We had a ball, and I suspect so did the BLUGgies. I saw quite a number of Windows admins in the crowd, and they appeared quite taken aback by the ease of setting up stuff under Linux, especially when Shanu set up the Secure Access Point (no weakling WEP here!) and the VPN.

The only bad part of the evening (for me) was my being hit by a sinus inflammation minutes before we started. I asked Jessie if she had any Crocin with her, but no joy. And so I suffered through the meet with a really violent headache, bad enough to force me to sit down and continue halfway through my talk. And I most certainly wasn’t at my best during this talk.

Lots of socialising after the meet. Food was excellent as usual, and plentiful – we definitely got our money’s worth. The coffee was completely geek-quality – I was tossing and turning till 3 a.m.! Lots of fun, lots of leg pulling, lots of “hail fellow well met”.

Let’s see if we can keep up the quality with the next meet.

This Friday is the monthly Bangalore Linux Users Group meet, and Gopi, Shanu and I will be doing a series of short talks on Wireless Networking and deployment of Wireless LANs under Linux. Hopefully the topic will be interesting enough to get a lot of BLUG veterans, who have been missing from the monthly meets, to come and attend again.

Madhu won’t be around to defend C++’s honour, but as always, we expect a lot of fun after the formal agenda of the meet is over. I look forward to meeting tons of people, and messing with their minds. As always, this article of mine should provide essential reading to those who plan to bunk *again*.

Since the early 90′s, I have always published my email address in my articles, talks and other public places. In those days few people had email addresses at all, so that wasn’t really much of an issue if a lot of people knew my address, because it gave me the chance to interact with countless people over the years – people I would not have met otherwise, some of whom went on to become my closest friends

But over the years, the world changed. 40% of all email today is unsolicited mail, and despite my best home-grown filters, I find myself spending a good amount of time every day trying to discover the real messages in the deluge of ads that promise to grow certain parts of my body (I wonder – if that actually works, why don’t these spammers use their own stuff to grow a brain?)

Finally, I gave up, and rolled in the big guns. For the past few days, I have deployed SpamAssassin on our mail server.

The impact has been unbelievable.

In 4 days, SpamAssassin has managed to filter more than 500 spam messages from my mailbox, without tagging a single legitimate message as spam. And this is just for me alone – my collegues should be seeing similar results.

In fact, I am now so confident of SpamAssassin’s ability to filter out spam, that I no longer tell it to save such messages in a special mail folder for later perusal – I now ask it to send anything it thinks is spam to /dev/null. Period.

When I open my mailbox, all I see is legitimate mail – not a single ad.

Well, almost.

Some Indian organisations still manage to slip past the filters, simply because the mails they send are handcrafted – they actually use Outlook Express to send these messages one by one. Amateurs!

In such cases, I simply throw their addresses into a blacklist generator (it adds the sender’s email to a blacklist), and that’s the end of it – that person/organisation will never be able to send me another piece of mail – legitimate or otherwise.

And so I now breathe freely. For the first time in years, I open my mail, actually looking forward to the process. Sure, the volume is a lot less (which can be quite an ego damper , but the signal-to-noise ration is *way* up!

Yay!

If anyone had any doubt that Saturday’s party had a mind-altering effect on some of the guests, then check these two snaps of Kishore – taken about 12 hours apart – the left on Saturday night, the right on Sunday.

And so it came to pass that the hordes of Bangalore partied till deep into the night….

Saturday was a day of great happenings, and much change, and the conviction that we really should have had a plan C.

By afternoon, Mrinal and Sashi turned up with Phenom’s equipment, only to find that they had forgotten the snare drum. So they went off to borrow one from Cryptic’s drummer Durga (who refused my earnest plea to join the party – bah!).

In the meanwhile, we were busy setting up the equipment in the newly cleared stage area in our garden. Got everything wired up, tested it out – sounded great.

And then it started raining.

Time for Plan B.

We quickly disassembled everything and moved the show into the basement. 30 minutes later, everything was assembled there, and we moved into soundcheck mode. I am not very good at this, but at the end of another 30 minutes, I had everything more or less nicely balanced, and Gaurav did “December”, which sounded near perfect. Most everyone was crowded into the basement by now, while the rain beat down outside.

And then the electricity went out, not to return.

There was no Plan C.

By now, the house was overflowing with more than 40 guests, the food had arrived, and chaos was in full swing.

The rain had stopped by now, which was no good to us, for without electricity no instruments could be used.

So everyone launched into the food. Chicken kababs were a major hit, and disappeared at high speed.

Quickly, several groups formed – Anjali’s classmates, Shubha’s friends, the PESIT gang, etc. I was going nuts.

Finally grabbed my guitar, sat in the frontyard, and sang a few songs. That inspired Gaurav enough to sing some himself. In the meanwhile, Sashi, Noella and Mrinal were in the basement, doing vocal harmonies – and I missed all that. Bleh!

Anjali had the time of her life (or so it seemed) – tons of goodlooking hunks all around. And then there was Ashwin

In most parties that I have been to that involved Ashwin, he usually proceeds to decimate everyone with his wit – except that this time, something seemed to have gone wrong, and most everyone ganged up on him, resulting in some serious “Get Shorty” action!

Good fun!

By midnight, most people had disappeared, and a few of us were still around when the electricity finally came back – which resulted in yet another round of action.

Ashwin finally realised that Kishore was more than a match for him (and then there were my 115 KG to deal with, too.

We finally wound up around 1:30am. This party definitely hadn’t gone according to plan, but it was fun nevertheless. We’ll have to have a make-up jam session at some time, but Anjali most definitely had a 13th Birthday party worth remembering, which is of course what this was all about.

Some pictures here.