Posts by: Kalyan Varma

Instead of waiting for big game like tigers and elephants, I’ve started to appreciate little things in the jungle which most people just ignore or don’t bother to have a closer look. For example, take this desert succulent plant. This is found almost all over india and many species of this plant develop spikes at the edge of their leaves filled with toxins to keep enemies away. This one here clearly advertising the fact that the spikes have toxins by color coding them and hence asking everyone to stay away. Who says plants do not communicate 🙂 I’ve uploaded rest…

When it comes to innovation and trying out new hacks, google rocks. If you are a Unix user, you are just going to love the new Google Suggest feature. Auto-completion of search keywords 🙂 Yahoo and MSN are finally catching up on desktop search and I presume after today, they will start working on the Auto-completion feature and roll it out after couple of months.

<Commercial Mode On> In case you want your portfolio done, portrait of you taken for an online dating service, interiors of your office photographed, need pictures for your company PR kit, themed images for your a calender, just ping your friendly neighborhood photographer 😉 </Commercial Mode Off> Trying to make a living out of photography is *very* *very* tough.

Linux-Bangalore/2004 finally comes to an end. I attended exactly 3 talks. Slept through one, the other two were quite interesting and the rest were pure tech talks which frankly I can learn by reading up online. For me, LB has been an excellent place to catch up with loads of old friends, meeting people from online communities (LJ, LUG’s) for the first time (now you can associate a face to that person), people from my college etc. Many folks came up to introduce themselves and mentioned that they read by blog. Cool! Thanks for dropping by to say hi. There…

No wifi, no LAN, no GPRS, no Internet at LB2004. So jace jumps in, dials out via his reliance phone, makes his powerbook a wifi router and now the speaker lounge has wifi access. Yay to jace and may the force be with you. Now back to my slides. Remember : If you want to attend, my talk is at 10am tomorrow.

The trip to bandipur and kabini was *Excellent* and I already can’t wait to get back to this place. Though we could not see many mammals, we had a gala time spotting the birds, insects and best of all the appreciating the flora. Will post some of the lovely plant pictures later when I have time. Eventful week coming up. Me and my IISC prof are doing a combined keynote at the Storage Area Network CEO summit on Dec 1st. This will be my first major talk in front of a non-tech audience and I hope I can print my…

In 5 hours, I am off to Bandipur and kabini again. This time its a longer trip and I’m back again only on the weekend. I will have my laptop to transfer all my images at the end of the day, so hopefully that will mean more pics (== better pics). I hope to spend some time with the baby elephant again. Bye bye polluted world.

After many weeks of waiting, I finally have my laptop with me. Its a Thinkpad T41p and I just love the 1400×1050 resolution that comes with it. Once I have the GPRS connection setup to my phone, things should be rocking. I installed linux and almost everything works out-of-the-box. Still need to get hardware acceleration working for my video card and need to buy myself a wifi router. In other news, Rasmus lost his Thinkpad T42p at a PHP conference. Imagine, a PHP user stealing a laptop from the creator of PHP.

For the past 4 days, I’ve been having heavy lunch and dinner outside everyday coz of Diwali. Yesterday I had lunch at kamat yatrinivas (superb and heavy food for anyone who wants to try north Karnataka food ) and dinner at a friends place. My stomach is so full, I feel like a python that has just consumed a really large pig and now needs few weeks of hibernation. This year I have burst more crackers then ever before. No matter what people say about the noise/smoke pollution, I just love bursting crackers and to be honest I love the…

Every once in a while, you experience an event which will make you stop and makes you think about how beautiful things around you are. How you have been missing the gems of life in your everyday hectic schedule… Last weekend was like that. I was in bandipur forest and on monday morning, I saw a few hour old elephant baby taking its first steps in life. I saw the baby searching for her mother breasts. I saw the baby trying to figure out how to suck milk out of her mother, I saw the baby lose balance, I saw…