Vivek’s Party
Monday, February 28, 2005
We gave Vivek a surprise on Saturday, and he gave us a treat on Sunday.
Tags: shuttered eye
Flickr/vishnu
Monday, February 28, 2005
The last post was an experiment in posting to the blog through Flickr, just about the best online hosting resource for photos. Now, I have created a page over there, clicky clicky!
A word about the advantages of using an offline hosting resource: one, you save space. Two, you get unique features (click on vai and gau) that aren’t available in any hosted solution. And three, having it offline means that you can manipulate it in other ways too… it isn’t blog specific. For the disadvantages, there’s the fact that your files aren’t under your personal control, and also the ever present danger that the service might fold down.
However, Vysnu is going to move to such a model… integrating Flickr, Del.icio.us, Audioscrobbler, and perhaps even Amazon into this site.
Tags: vysnu.com
Vaibhav and Gauri
Monday, February 28, 2005
Vaibhav and Gauri… yeah, I’m an uncle! 
Tags: shuttered eye
Kerala Blog Roll
Friday, February 25, 2005
My referer logs tell me that I’ve made it to a list of Malayalam blogs online. It’s a very useful and interesting collection, kudos to the author.
Tags: me outside
Sig9 Words Usage
Thursday, February 24, 2005
An interesting idea yesterday night and three hours of work this morning led me to create Sig9 Words Usage.
The idea behind Usage is to create a simple page which chunks out real world usage instances of difficult English words, in cases where a simple Google Search isn’t enough.
This complements the excellent Sig9 Words created by Vivek, and if I can believe his plans this time 
Words is going to increase its database a lot in the near future :-D.
Try out Usage: eschew, mellifluous, profligate, arcane, etc.
More sweet goodies will come out of the Vysnu factory soon, stay tuned
Tags: chaff • development • me outside
Koal: Future Plans
Sunday, February 20, 2005
I have huge plans for Koal, the least of which is actually making it the “best online reading repository for independent writing on the net.”
But.. sigh.. koal.com is taken… and so I need a favor from you people… if you can spare the time, find me a good domain name to go with Koal. I don’t mind a name change (as long as it is good), but I do have one criteria - the domain should either be very short (<5 letters) or should be infinitely rememberable.
Thanks in advance!
Tags: chaff
Dishaa Distilled
Sunday, February 20, 2005
It’s been exactly one week since Dishaa, and enough time has now passed (I think) for me to give a small review of the event.
Distilling an event like this into a post will mean that I’ll leave out details, and the things that I do mention will probably not appear that important. So I’ll not even try here… this isn’t a recap per se of the event, these are just my feelings.
Held on the 12th and 13th of this month, Dishaa ‘05 was the culmination of lots of hard work, spur-of-the-moment planning, immense improvisation, lack of money, and brilliant innovation from a batch that isn’t well known for either its cooperation or talent. What makes an event like this work though (more than anything else) is belief. By a very few people too. Belief… until the event snowballs, coz when (not if) it does, you only need to angle it to the shore to create an event.
To create a good event, you need to armwrestle with it, push and pull and kill and sweat, and make ends meet by any means possible. For this Dishaa, we needed to do a helluva lot of all of those. And if I’m very truthful, a lot of things were very badly done and need much improvement: judges, events, stage and venue planning, gap fillers, rules, decoration, publicity, time management, and a good many other things. Self congratulations are in order though, because I don’t think anybody in the city really thought we’d pull it off as well as we did… all the reviews I got were positive, and that in itself says much.
An area where I thought we should have immense improvement in the future is participation, especially for technical events. Due to many reasons, invitations went off to schools and colleges a little later than I’d have liked it to, and I attribute the low turnout to that. It’s something that I’ll keep in mind for the next Dishaa.
If you were present at Dishaa ‘05, kudos, for you have a share of the success. Be there at Dishaa ‘06; conducting it will be fun
Tags: chaff
Vysnu/Wordpress 1.5
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Vysnu is now running on Wordpress 1.5. My initial impressions about the upgrade is that it deserves the accolade it’s receiving. The ability to create new pages, like this one, for example, is very useful. The entire UI overhaul also breathes refinement, something many other CMSs (for Wordpress is now a mile above a blog) doesn’t have.
It also remains the most user-friendly CMS out there… it’s simple to set up and get it working the way you want it. Even the upgrade process took only about 30 minutes if I exclude the time it took to backup everything.
Tags: vysnu.com
Upgrade
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Just a note to let you know that Vysnu, Sig9 and all related sites are now hosted on a faster and better server. We had grown too large to be accomodated on the older Neureal host, and had to switch.
Asmallorange is the first thing that came to mind (It includes PHP, Python, et.al and to add to it, is cluetrainish) and I’d recommend it to anyone pursuing a host.
As far as I know, the upgrade has gone off without a glitch, however, anyone experiencing slight glitches either over here or at Sig9… you now know the reason.
(Update): Because I’m upgrading to the latest and greatest, this site may not behave as it is supposed to for a few hours.
Tags: vysnu.com
Ashok
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Ashok is a brilliant, creative guy. And now, he has his own domain.
Tags: chaff
To Valentine
Monday, February 14, 2005
Some observations on love (or what I think it is).
- Love isn’t the end all be all. It just is.
- Like many other things, love doesn’t un/happen for a reason. This isn’t anything that is cosmically special about love… it’s just life.
- The good thing about love is that two (more?) perfectly crappy people can get together and make it better. Nothing else I know works like this exactly.
- To love other people, you need to first like yourself. Otherwise, you end up screwing things up.
- Treat em right.
Tags: chaff
Loyola: Again
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
I went back to Loyola today. Actually, it’s not been long since my last visit… I’ve been there twice already to invite people for Dishaa, but this time round, I actually went to class and talked to kids from the 8th, 7th and 6th standards.
It was a seriously nice experience. People haven’t took me this seriously since forever… hanging on to every word I had to say… and it seems that the level of exuberance they display decreases with their age. It’s amazing to talk to kids really, but I don’t think I have it in me to be a teacher… managing a class like that is very much beyond me.
Anyways, I’m really busy with Dishaa… do take the time to be there.
Tags: chaff