Posts by: Kalyan Varma

Leaving for Vizag tomorrow on a 4 day trip to attend a family function. I am visiting my home town after almost 2 years and hopefully this time it will be less sweaty. Once you spend couple of years in bangalore, you just don’t feel like staying anywhere else in India. I for one sweat a lot and its a nightmare for me when I visit coastal areas. Also the one-way train journey to Vizag is close to 20 hours (atleast I can catch up on all the half read my books I have lying around) The bright side is…

http://in.news.yahoo.com/040701/43/2epu5.html Scores of gay rights activists marched in Delhi on Thursday demanding the removal of a colonial law which makes homosexuality illegal. Shouting slogans and waving banners, dozens of gays, lesbians and transvestites walked around the Jantar Mantar observatory demanding a change in section 377 in the Indian Penal Code. The section bans homosexual activity, calling it “against the order of nature” and makes it punishable by a fine and a prison sentence up to 10 years. … Passers-by stopped to look at the group demonstrating in favour of gay rights just four days after a similar march drew wide…

Looks like Gmail is having a tough time catching up with loads of new users (It was expected). I currently get the following error when I hit gmail. Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Hey, at least they have a sense of humor. Their Ad system seems to work quite well. In an email to someone, I called the person a ‘Fatty’ and google showed him 3 ads about weight loss programs right next to the email. Also Userfriendly.org is on gmail theme this week.

The trip was *Amazing*. 3 days ,3 people and 1000 kilometers in a great car. Experienced the best of monsoon, best of kerala and came across come really nice kerala people. Seriously monsoon is the best time to visit kerala. The places are lovely, greenery everywhere and prices in all the amazing resorts are dead cheap. I plan to visit kerala at the break of monsoon next year and follow it up inland. Pictures from the trip are up here. and the trip itenary.

In couple of hours I’ll set out on a road trip with yathin and fus over the weekend to experience the best of Indian monsoon in Kerala. We shall drive down the kerala coast as far as we can reach till monday morning and then we head back. Off for now.

I needed to pull some info from a mysql DB and I ssh to the remote box and do $ select * from foo where foo=bar; and I get the following error bash: syntax error near unexpected token `from’ I break my head for 10 min trying to figure out what the heck was going wrong and then I realise I was still on the bash shell and never used the mysql client to login to the DB. I never realised there was a command line version of the select syscall. I think I should go sleep now.

Looks like Amazon is setting up its development center in Bangalore in next couple of months. Personally I rank amazon as one of the best tech companies out there and Wired seems to think the same too. They stuck to their roots, never compromised on anything and though its not a cash cow company, they retained the passion of silicon valley. Though people rave about google so much, I am waiting to see how google would look 3 – 4 years from now. In other news Infosys has been ranked above IBM and Microsoft in The Wired 40 companies driving…

70mm – ISO 200 – f/4.5 – 1/1000sec Took the picture using a black polymer sun-filter which is used to normal viewing. Could not zoom in and take the pic coz of the small size of the filter (1x1cm). And NO, this is not a photoshop/gimp trick

I got myself a turtle 2 days ago as a pet. This is the first real pet I’ve ever had and so far I seem to be having nice time with it. I am yet to name the small bugger, but he is very jumpy and takes every chance to splash in water. The four month old turtle I managed to get some really nice shots in the evening, post rain with my totally out-of-focus black front gate as the backdrop. I cut the pics into 1024×768 versions in case any of you want to use it as a wallpaper….

Sushanth ( khorgath ), the bum decided to call it quits and today happens to be his last day at work. He is planning to chill out for couple of months and pursue his higher studies after that. What can I say.. I met him 7 years ago on the 2nd day of college . He overheard me talking about pascal with someone and joined in the conversation. We introduced ourselves and then ended up talking a lot about games, internet etc. We became friends, organized the tech events together in out 1st college fest, started working on linux, he…