The temperature in Chennai is at all time high and soaring. Its increasingly difficult venture outdoor these days without breaking into a sweat. For those confined to the cosy comforts of your home/office/home-office, it wouldn’t make much difference. However, if you’re the type who has to travel for work, then you’re bloody gonna find it difficult. Worry not, as I’m in the same boat and have a few tips to share.

• Fluids – Drink loads of water. Your body is continously working to keep its temperature down by sweating. This is an automatic process and nature’s way of protecting you from severe heat. In order to keep going, its important that you take in as much water as you can.
  Drink tender coconut water atleast once a day. This is by far, the best natural coolant that you can find. Helps avoid dehydration.
  As you sweat, a lot of body salts are depleted. An easy way to replenish lost salts is to have lemonade or butter-milk mixed with salt.
• Clothing – Cotton and linen are fabrics that breathe and are the best during summer. Wear loose fitting light coloured clothes as they’ll keep you feeling fresh through the day. Pastel shades and cool blues are in. Black and darker colours are out as they tend to show sweat marks once dried.
• Accessories – Wear sunglasses. In addition to making you look cool and sexy, sun glasses play a pivotal role in blocking harmful UV radiation that can lead to cataract.
• The other things – Wash the face regularly with cool water. This helps in cleaning out the pores which can get accumulated with dirt leading to acne and pimples.

These are some simple tips that I’ve been following to beat the heat. If you’ve got similar interesting tips to share, do so by leaving a comment.

So Salman Khan is out on bail. The Indian media has been in a frenzy past couple of days covering every bit of what it feels for a celebrity of his stature to be jailed. Its crazy if you ask me, but I guess thats how news is portrayed in India. If it aint sensational, it aint news!

A five year imprisonment is not the ideal punishment for killing a black buck. Yes, it might set a precedent to prevent poaching of endagered species in future but apart from that, there’s no value add to the problem. The livelihood of thousands of people connected to the film industry is involved as a lot of money (estimated to be over Rs.150 crores) is riding on him. In this scenario, a better punishment would be to slap a hefty fine on him and use that money in wildlife conservation.

Thats mini-me with Salman and dad in the picture. We’ve had the privilege of playing host to Salman many years ago in Dubai and if I remember well, it was shortly after his super-hit film Saajan. Salman has got this sort of cult following in Dubai among the localites especially the women. Whenever he was spotted outside, people would scream and rush to him like a swarm of bees. This was at a time when he was just tasting success. I can only imagine what it would be like now!

Salman’s visit home had also turned me into a sort of mini-celebrity amongst my friends. Some of them thought that he was related to me and I never really bothered to correct that notion. :) Funnily, I was invited to a lot more parties and my friends circle in the apartment block grew! Thank you Salman.

Last night, I was watching the news on Salman’s release. There was chaos outside his residence in Mumbai as hordes of his fans tried to catch a glimpse of their superstar. Salman stood on his terrace and acknowledged the support and love that he got. He began waving and in-between did some funny poses (some Bharathnatyam steps). He might be 40 years old, but he is still that young Salman that I met many years ago basking in the adulation of his fans!

And so, all the good things had to come to an end. BarCampChennai exceeded all our expectations and was one of the best events to have been organized in recent times.

The best part of BarCamps is the people it brings together. Everyone had something to contribute to and it cant get any better than to talk about things you are passionate about. I’ve always had a sceptical view of technology and how it makes people disconnect themselves from things around them. However, all that perception changed after spending 2 whole days at Anna University interacting with people from diverse backgrounds who came together purely for their passion to learn and share knowledge.

How else would anyone have learnt about the students who built a tool that will aggregate all your email and deliver it to your mobile devices; about the simple file tracking device conceptualized for utilizing small scale industries for its production; about news aggregators being built purely for the indian diaspora; about a new programming language being developed that will help visualize all your code; about desinging a large scale citizen database that will help governments in their logistics for delivering services like relief material during calamities, essential commodities for villages etc.; about how to make money blogging (yes!); and may more.

All of this wouldn’t have been possible (at least to the extent that it was) if not for the sponsors who showed tremendous support and encouragement on their part. I would like to thank Kiruba, our sponsors, the team of organizers (who by the way spent a lot of time discussing and shooting emails on Google Groups), the folks at Anna University who put up a fantastic show, making sure that things were running smoothly and all the people who came from different parts of the country to attend and make this event a one of a kind! I would also like to thank Gaurav Bhatnagar of Tekriti Software whom I met in Delhi (and Amit Ranjan of Uzanto, although I didnt get to meet him while in Delhi) for sharing their experiences on conducting BarCampDelhi – the first in India.

Here’s looking forward to much more exciting events in future. Cheers!

I spent some time playing around with Taazza – a yet to launch India focussed news aggregation site. Its pretty much in alpha stage but there are quite a few interesting things that we can look forward to, which I’ll be attempting to cover here.

Taazza is built entirely on Ruby using the Rails framework. There are also some subtle Ajax implementations, which appears to be the “in thing” nowadays in Web 2.0 space. Some of the things that are inherently built into Tazzaa gives it the “fresh” look to the site. By the way, ‘Taazza’ is a word of hindi origin, meaning “fresh”. Arjun and his team are working on giving a fresh approach to viewing news online. News aggregation is pretty much getting crowded, but it will take smart approach to stand out from ones that already exist.

One of the things that I really like about Taazza is this slidebar to narrow your news stories based on time. You can view news stories as fresh as within the hour to upto 2 days – this has been thought of really well as a way to retrieve the freshest of news. Taazza also extracts the latest quotes from all the news sources based on a simple algorithm which gives you a quick run down on who’s talking what.

Taazza also does this pretty impressive integration of Google maps. When you search for a particular topic/region, it displays a list of all the news stories based on the query and also a display of the map with balloons pointing to the source(s) of that news.

So, will Taazza be the next big thing in news aggregation? Its pretty difficult to say. I viewed the site from a designers perspective and there were quite a few glitches in terms of interface design. I strongly feel that the color scheme and the logo does not really gel with the word “fresh” and that needs to be addressed. Apart from all the geek speak, it is after all the ordinary user thats gonna help gauge the popularity of the site.

BarCampChennai is under session and I’ll be attempting to live blog it. This is my first attempt at Live Blogging and will be updating interesting nuggets of each presentation rather than the whole thing. Watch this space for live updates on BarCampChennai.

BarCamp Chennai – Day 1
Kiruba just gave a small informal introduction and started off the session. The room is filling up and there is a lot of energy in here. Amit Ranjan from Uzanto Delhi is giving his experiences of conducting the Delhi BarCamp

Question: Why BarCamp? Shouldn’t it be called a DhabaCamp for Indian audience??

Ganesh Padmanabhan of Voice Snap is giving a presentation on voice mail application. Sounds really interesting. Check it out at voicesnap.com
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Vinu from Emergic is presenting on MyToday.com – “Do you have Firefox?”, he asks!!! He asks again -”Why dont you have firefox here?” :) We learn that the chap from JustSamachar.com was hired for MyToday.com – nice!
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Vijay of LeadStep talks on Project Infranet (Infrastructure Networks) – he’s looking at developing a framework for streamlining citizen data. It’s a debatable issue and needs to be looked into more deeply.
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Balaji talks on a simple file tracking system that can employ small scale industries to develop it. Interesting little experiment and I’d really love to see it work especially after having worked in the RFID scene for quite some time.
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Narain “mixify” of 360 Interactive talks about Web 2.0 or “Live Web”.
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Arjun Ram of Taazza.com, a news aggregation service in the making, asks “Where are the machans?”. Arjun is working on developing a news aggregation site that will allow you to narrow down your news to lower levels like, “I want to know whats happening in Besant Nagar or Mylapore”. Arjun also demos Taazza. *Interestingness*. An iPod Shuffle is in the offing for the best review of Taazza. Write your reviews and post your link on Arjun’s blog
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Suman talks on NPL – a new programming language that he’s developing that will enable you to visualize code. While the discussion is a little too technical for me, I take a break and apply the Law of Two Feet to check out the session at Track 2.
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Track 2 has quite a packed audience. Amit Aggarwal of Digital Inspiration talks on how to make money from blogging. “Its all about writing with passion at the end of the day”. Amit says that there is a lot of money to be made by just blogging. But is blogging really about making money?
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Back on Track 1, Charles from AdventNet talks on the ZOHO Suite of Applications. ZOHO is attempting to replicate the Office Suite for the web. They’ve got a really nice logo. The applications look interesting but they need to work on the user experience to attract more customers onto their site. Well, thats my 2 cents!
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Muthu from Sun Microsystems, Bangalore is gung-ho about xDesign (User Experience Design). Muthu has been working on user heuristics and usability ever since I’ve known him and is really passionate about it, which, is great!

Day 1 : Its a wrap!

BarCamp Chennai – Day 2
By the time I got here, a session was already in progress. The new Microsoft Office 2007 was being demoed and I did catch a glimpse of exciting things that are expected soon.
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Atul Chitnis talks about Mobile Computing. “Sending an sms using one hand will not get you into trouble in a classroom.” Atul evangelizes the use of mobile devices for computing and believes that the desktop is gonna be replaced by smaller devices for infotainment purposes.

BarCampChennai photos are available here

More updates to follow..

The 2007 Audi TT. Awesome lines! Somehow I find the new TT bears a striking resemblance to the Porsche Cayman. The design process reveals it all.

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