Posts by: Kalyan Varma

It’s been almost a month since I’ve last updated. December has been a very busy month and something or the other kept me busy. Random things in no particular order I finally decided to write my own gallery scripts. I’ve played around with so many of them, but all of them fell short. All of them use the concept of ‘Albums’ which does not work for me. Wrote a gallery system from scratch which uses tags for everything. I should have it up and running in a week (and this time I promise) Got myself the Maxtor 250GB disk. No…

It was good enough to win me the ‘Wildlife Photographer of the Year‘ title it seems. Since most of you do not get Sanctuary Magazine, here’s the information that’s been written inside about the front cover: “Kalyan Varma is the Sanctuary ABN AMRO Wildlife Photographer of the year 2005. This is his image of a worker ant Harpegnathos saltator assassinating the de-alated queen” This brilliant and aesthetically beautiful image reveals a worker jumping ant Harpegnathos saltator murdering the queen. The image was shot in Karnataka’s BRT Wildlife Sanctuary in the Southern Western Ghats. The queen had just torn off her…

Starting early tomorrow morning, I’m off to Kanha National park in Madhya Pradesh on a 4 day photography trip. Going there with some kickass equipment like a 500mm IS lens as my camera is broken right now (more about it later). From there I’m off to Mumbai on some very important work. I’ll be there from 7th to 10th. Anyone wants to meetup there ?

Line in front of foss.in venue on the 1st day FOSS.IN has been an amazing success this time. The new style show payed off and there was lot more interaction between speakers and participants and among the participants themselves. Wifi worked, so I could sit and do all my work while I was attending all the boring talks. My Wildlife talk never happened, but I think I managed to pull off the security talk quite well (considering the Security BOF after the talk was fully packed). Watch out for more updates at Planet FOSS

Sorry about the short notice, but tomorrow, I’m giving a talk on “Wildlife Conservation using FOSS” at FOSS.IN/2005. My talk got pushed into the schedule just yesterday and I just got back from my trip this evening. So looks like I’ll have to sit up all night to finish the slides. My other talk’s on thursday where I’m talking about “Web Application Security”. Do make it for that talk if you can, should be quite entertaining. And in other news, thanks to a big screwup by Fedex, jeremy ain’t making it this years event.

Starting tomorrow morning, I’m off for a week for a cousin’s wedding at Pallakollu, AP. I should be back, just in time for foss.in/2005. This is a wedding that’s happening in my family after 12 years and I’ll meet all the relatives whom I haven’t met in 12 years. Hope everything goes well 🙂

It’s that time of the year when all roads for geeks lead to Bangalore. FOSS.IN/2005 starts in less then 10 days and I’m quite excited about this year’s event. Most of you know, Linux-Bangalore/2003 was a blast, and the years before that was total party too, and after that, linux-bangalore/2004 was quite a drag. Many blamed it on the participants, some on the speakers and few even said it was the bad food. But personally I think it was because linux world itself changed. Let me tell you why Few years ago, no one ever heard of Linux and it…

Last week, when I had parked my car on a side of a street, this jeep came and banged my car on the side, jamming the side door window. After taking the car through bad road of BR hills, I had given it for servicing earlier this week and picked it up yesterday after a fat bill. Today afternoon, a truck come and crashed into my car from behind on hosur road. My seat broke, back doors are jammed and the whole of back is smashed up. The driver said sorry and there is nothing more that I could do…