Raju Alluri’s Personal Blog

The street-side (curb side) bookshops are iconic in India’s print industry. You normally find two types of such book shops: the ones that sell daily/periodical material like news papers, weeklies and other magazines; the ones that sell (often pirated or used) books on the curb side.

For more than six years after I relocated to India, one single book store (of the first kind) primarily served my newspaper and magazine purchases in Hyderabad. This is the one at S. R. Nagar circle off Umesh Chandra statue. Today is the last day of that book store, because their lease is expiring and they are not renewed.

This shop is so convenient for me that I used to go there by bicycle or scooter. The best part is that there are no traffic signals in either route from home. About five times a week (when I am in town) I used to go to this store to purchase print materials. I am a very regular early morning customer for them. Going there is as regular as my morning glass of chocolate milk.

I am going to miss this shop from tomorrow. The friendly smile of the shop owner, his 6.00am activity in that block and the occasional exchange of his concerns and pains. All of them. Interestingly, I don’t know his name and he doesn’t know mine. We always greeted each other with a smile. I am going to miss him. Bye Bye!

It is fun and technology again. No time to take photos. Shared some ideas, issues, tools and tricks with my OpenSolaris buddies and some of the attendees. More socializing with Sun folks. Interacted with more attendees and suggested hints on the best ways to learn (a) OpenSoalris, (b) Java technologies. There are some in depth discussions on virtualization, types (and the good, bad & ugly) of hypervisor technologies from Sun and others.

Had to shorten my visit today due to other commitments in the evening. Short, yet sweet!

I am at Sun Tech Days-Hyderabad-Day1 today. As usual, this is a mega event with lot of fun and technology. Satish did a short demo of VirtualBox during Rich Green’s keynote. Jairam did a demo of Sun’s virtualization/management technologies and I heard it went well. I spent my entire day around enterprise/Java technology tracks. During breaks I spent some time with my old pals. I could clearly sense increased awareness of OpenSolaris when compared to last year. The overall opensource pitch is helping Sun.

After the event there is a welcome reception in the night. The famous Euphoria band entertained the attendees. I spent about half an hour there before heading home for prior commitments. Overall, it is a fun filled day with tech toppings.

Read synopsis of railway budget 2008 introduced today. Given that we have an election year, the budget is made attractive enough. Unfortunately, the state of Andhra Pradesh gets (the usual) step motherly treatment this year too. The state gets no good benefits in new trains or infrastructure improvements.

Good:

• Reduction in fares
• Infrastructure improvements
• Emphasis on safety
• Improved ticketing (cell phones, etc.)
• Reduced fright charges for certain types of fuel

Bad:

• Additional berths in three tier, making life more miserable
• New concessions have a potential to clog the already busy travel networks, especially during peak holiday season.

Overall, it is a good budget. People in Andhra may still have to suffer in busy routes like Hyderabad-Bangalore, Hyderabad-Visakhapatnam and other internal routes.

Today I collected my RC book (for my Santro; read more) from RTA office in Khairatabad. The process is very simple and I got my RC book within a minute or two. Good service!

In the last few months, Surya developed interest in Chess. He wanted to participate in a local chess tourney. His school teacher, B. K. Ravi, works with Dronacharya Chess Academy (DCA.) DCA conducted a weekend chess tourney on 23rd and 24th. Surya participated in the event as a non-member.

The event is conducted at Vasavi Club, opposite Sensation Theater in Hyderabad. The tourney is well planned and well organized. Being still novice, Surya managed two points from 5 games. He got good exposure though, playing with kids from different schools.

SuryaChessFeb2008

BTW, if you want to know more about DCA, contact Sameer Kumar at 92463 44435 or Srinivas at 92914 69670.

Friday’s talk at Osmania University is well received. The attendees number about 70. I had some issues with my laptop and the projector, so couldn’t do a hands-on session of OpenSolaris.

After the talk, there is some discussion about leads to learning shell scripting and related areas. Here you can find some material for starting with any Unix variant.

A few months ago, I had issues with the IRQs on my laptop and OpenSolaris build 72 (Developer Express). I installed Build 79a now and my laptop is running great with OpenSolaris. The NetBeans PHP IDE that is bundled as part of Developer Express looks cool! So do a couple of Avahi tools.

I am giving a talk on OpenSolaris today at Infinity2k8, Osmania University. I am also inviting membership to HOSUG, Hyderabad OpenSolaris User Group. Feel free to join this UG.

Microsoft agrees to open APIs and standards documentation (news1, news2). Also, there is some sort of a pledge not to sue over open source. More here. Looks like a good news for small technology players and the open source community in general. Hope big leaps are following these baby steps. Here is Microsoft’s open source page.