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Got back this morning from a trip to Cochin, Kerala. Cherian, Deepak, Akhil and Suneef thanks a lot for the ensuring a wonderful time guys. The place was amazing. Yesterday, went out to Fort Kochi to see the Chinese fishing nets and tried out the most tastiest fish I’ve ever had in my life. The concept is pretty simple: The fishermen catch the fish using the nets and they display them fresh right there. You buy the fish you want and walk over to the other side of the road, where a small restaurant will cook it for you. I…

Palm Civet Droppings Two months ago when when I was at BR Hills, Narayana, the local tribal showed me these civet droppings just off the road. Normally coffee planters do not have issues with any animals, as none of them touch the coffee beans, except the common palm civet. The civet loves coffee berries and when it eats them, the civet only digests the fruit and the actually coffee bean, comes out in its droppings. Civet Cat Now follow this closely People believe that these civets know how ripe these berries are and they always pick the berries which are…

Except for sleep, I’ve basically been partying the last two days non-stop , thanks a ton for everything, you made sure I’ve had the best birthday of my life and pampered my like king the last 2 days 😀 and thanks everyone else too who turned up at coffee world and herbs and spices and everyone and all the folks who flooded me with sms, lj comments and emails 🙂 Carrots and lemons will never be the same again.

Last month, after the Wildlife Award, I’ve seen a big spike in users coming to my site via search engines, looking for my photographs. Except for the photographs on my blog, I really did not have anything more. So I tried to play around with few open-source gallery systems. Almost all the OSS gallery’s are geared for travel photography, in the sense all of them have a directory style hierarchy and you are suppose to categorize your pics accordingly and place them in their respective folders. Since my pictures are wildlife ones, I wanted feature where, people can browse pictures…

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 🙂