Thejesh GN » Technology

1by2coffee: Cup9: Oracle sues Google and Google cheats Net

Thejesh GN — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:16:01 +0000

Recently recorded a new episode of 1by2coffee with Veetrag aka @kv. KV and myself were hosting YAP at one point of time. He was at his home town Udaipur and had some free time. We used this opportunity to record this episode of b2c. The subject of the episode is very well defined by the title. We also talk about blackerry’s issues with Governments.

Go ahead listen
Cup9: Oracle sues Google and Google cheats Net

I Love Blr : Visualizing Bangalore Temperature

Thejesh GN — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:14:36 +0000

I was going through weather data exposed by India Water Portal and I was thinking about an interesting application which would show my love to Bangalore. The best part of Bangalore is its temperature, rains and clouds. So I wrote this small app which uses the data provided by India Water Portal (which in turn is by CRU). IWP has data for all the districts in India, for every month and for multiple parameters. They have data for 100 years. It quite an amount of data to play with if you are interested. They have an easy way of filtering and downloading.

It uses Jquery and data is JSON format. View source the page to get the code. I am not much of a visual guy. I browsed many sites to get a color pattern. Here is what I am using for different temperatures 20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30. All temperatures are monthly averages and are in degree centigrade.

It took two hours for me to code it. Go check the application and let me know what do you think.

I Love Bangalore..because

I will add rain and cloud information once I demystify that data.

1by2coffee: Cup8: Indian comics, graphic novels and more

Thejesh GN — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:48:50 +0000

Had great fun recording the eight episode of b2c. Both my guests Shweta and Lavanya are great fun to talk to. I should have them on regular basis. Had to end it abruptly because memory on the phone got over and also we reached our artificial time limit of 30 mins. According to me 30 mins or around 20mb is an optimum size. Let me know if you think otherwise.

BTW this episode is PG13 ( or is it 15?) and above.

Go ahead listen to the show and let me know
Cup8: Indian comics, graphic novels and more

Yes. I am inspired by TWIT and BOL. Why not?

1by2coffee: Coffee and Conversations with a Geek

Thejesh GN — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 11:07:50 +0000

I have been wanting to do podcast for a long time. As you know we started YAPodcast, but we couldn’t continue for many reasons. We are still trying to get it back. In the mean time I wanted to do a shorter form of podcast (max 30 mins and 30mb) in which we can talk about anything geekish. The name should convey our love for coffee, geekishness and sharing. 1by2coffee, a term used in Bangalore to describe sharing a cup of coffee with friends and usually involves interesting conversations. I couldn’t an apt name than 1by2coffee aka b2c. As usual thanks to @vsr for the logo. The blog uses podpress which makes podcasting easy with wordpress.

I have already recorded seven episodes on varying subjects. Head over to b2c to listen to them. You can as well subscribe to the audio feed. As of now we are planning to record once a week.

Thanks to all the early listeners and subscribers. Thanks to all the mails and feedback. Of course if you like to be part of the show, let me know.

Latest episode : Cup7: Inception, Grooveshark and Listener emails

Civic Hacking Workshop

Thejesh GN — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:28:58 +0000

A bunch of UK and Indian geeks gathered at Google office while Cameron was praising Sachin at Infosys campus. It was a kind of unconference made possible by CIS, with the UK Government’s Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office Team for Digital Engagement and Google. The discussions were around open data in India ( the lack of it) and UK, and possible ‘civic hacking’ of the data.

Started with general introductions of who they are, what they are working on and problems they have faced, in terms of getting data and pushing back into the main stream.

Geeks from Britain:
David McCandless (Information Is Beautiful) is London based information architect and designer. With in available time he made Akshara’s school data look beautiful. You should check his blog for beautiful visualizations of data. No wonder he calls himself a data journalist. I am planning to buy his book on data visualization if available in India :( I got few tips from him to improve my own election results visualization. I am planning to put it to work in a day or two.

Harry Metcalfe (TellThemWhatYouThink.org / Open Rights Group) he started wrote TellThemWhatYouThink.org, a site which aggregates central government consultations. He is also part of Open Rights Group. He pulled up a small mock up to display police atrocities reported using missed call concept.

Tim Green (Democracy Club) with Seb Bacon built Democracy Club. Democracy Club is an independent, volunteer-run website that acts as a hub where non-technical volunteers can help deliver civic society projects.

Edmund von der Burg of YourNextMP. YourNextMP is a place where you can learn more about your candidates and share information with other voters. They have no political bias or affiliation – we just want you to be informed when you go to vote. Conversations with him made me to come with idea of http://writetothem.in (still under construction, hence not a link). It should be up in a week’s time.

Rohan Silva is Special Adviser to the PM. I could see he was very interested in TextYourMP and MissedCall concepts. He along with Tim and Edmund helped in conceptualizing http://writetothem.in

Councillor Liam Maxwell of Eton and Castle Ward was unlike any other politicians I have met. Its inspiring and shocking (in a good way) to see a politician to push OpenSource. His papers on OpenSource, Open-Standards and internet are worth read.

From India Bangalore:
Alok Singh and Shivangi Desai work for Akshara Foundation which aims to bring literacy and teaching programmes to poorer children. They have data about school children (Govt) and their performance.

Arun Ganesh (Geohackers / National Institute of Design) of busroutes.in. Busroutes.in is a coll crowd-sourced website get the Chennai bus routes mapped onto OpenStreetMap. Today they have more information than the bus organization itself. The work they have done is phenomenal.

A. Pandian, Sridhar Raman, S. Raghavan Kandala work for Mapunity, which develops technology to tackle social problems and development challenges in India. Our GIS, MIS and mobile technologies are used mostly by Govt organizations and civil societies. They showcased their projects related to traffic and bbmp elections.

Sushant Sinha (IndianKanoon.com / Yahoo) started IndianKanoon.com which citizens to search for Indian laws and their interpretations easily. It crawls the judiciary websites and indexes them so they could be searched. It also tries to break the law documents into smallest possible clause and by integrating law/statutes with court judgments. A tight integration of court judgments with laws and with themselves allows automatic determination of the most relevant clauses and court judgments

Vijay Rasquinha of Mahiti demoed their projects which are based on cellphone and sms text messages. They have done lot of interesting projects using mobile as the platform. Mahiti is a social enterprise based in Bangalore. They provide Information and Communication Technology solutions through the strategic use of Free/Open Source Software.

P.G. Bhat (SmartVote.in). SmartVote.in is a citizen’s initiative to create a better civic life in their neighborhoods through collective action. Collective action will aim to reclaim the electoral process for the first and most immediate level of government

Pranesh Prakash is Programme Manager at Center for Internet and Society. CIS critically engages with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices, in the field of Internet and Society, with particular emphasis on South-South dialogues and exchange.

Raman Jit Singh Chima is an analyst, Public Policy and Government Affairs at Google, India. He hosted us.

Thejesh GN (yours truly) is a technologist at Janaagraha. Janaagraha is a Bangalore based not-for-profit organisation that works with citizens and government to change the quality of life in India’s cities and towns. iJanaagraha in four keywords is Knowledge+Network+Tools+Maps. As of now it’s centered around Bangalore. Ward Infrastructure & Services Assessment project( WISA) is programme is a unique initiative to assess quality of life in urban areas. It analyses various wards by its quality of infrastructure and rates them on scale of 0 – 10.

It was a great half a day unconference. I wish we had more time, we could have hacked something really interesting. As of now, I will go back to hacking WriteToThem.IN. AppEngine it is.

7 Years Of Blogging. What Next?

Thejesh GN — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 06:55:25 +0000

I have been here for 7 years now. Thanks to all my readers without whom it wouldn’t have been possible. Initially there used to be separate blogs for my tech and non-tech posts. Then i migrated them to the same blog as they both were very much part of my life.

There are certain subjects that I always constrained myself from blogging. My views on Politics, Economics, History, People, Indian/Western culture, Love, Sex, Spirituality etc. I would like to explore more on them here in future. Of course my notes on tech, travel and life continues. Expect all your support and suggestions.

I was reading a few posts from the past. Even though I remain the same person over the years, I can see I have grown with this blog. Thanks to internet and people it introduces to your life. Hope to see you all for many more years here and hope to catch you in offline world. Coffee is on me.

TEDx is not about talks

Thejesh GN — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:05:03 +0000

Before it becomes a controversy let me rephrase it. TEDx is not just about talks. Sure, it is the place where you can hear best of the people. But TEDx is also about people who have ideas. This way TEDx is not very different from TED.

‘Visual poetry’ was the theme for this event. Though it is great theme to have, I felt that it’s difficult to get the experts to speak on such a subject. The fact that they were able to great set of speakers with in such a short time was quite commendable.

TEDxBLR opened with a great dance performance from Richard and his friend. Although the stage was small, their dance was so awesome and graceful.

I am geek. I love to know how each machine work. The talk by Dr Uday Kumar Maiyya, the Oncologist, who treats cancer using super cool xray machines, was superb. His enthusiasm when he spoke about each gadget was viral.

These two performances were very emotional; Venkatram’s violin rendition and Lakshmi Pratury’s talk on ‘Billionaire of moments’.

Venkatram displayed how a change in single note can change the mood. Even though I don’t know the nuances of Carnatic music, I could appreciate his performance. Lakshmi Pratury ( Director TED India) ended the occasion by an excellent talk about ‘Billionaire of moments’, (slight explanation on what the title means).

The actual event for me began after the talks. I spent couple of hours talking to all other attendees.

The conversations ranged from very geekish subjects such as arduino to future of TEDx events in Bangalore. In between I had a couple of philosophical conversations which got me into thinking. I spent enough time thinking about the same while driving back to eCity. Of course Nexus one should have had a bigger battery.

Crossposted from IJ

Ijanaagraha – What we have for developers

Thejesh GN — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:43:32 +0000

Crossposted from Janaagraha.

Three months back when I was introduced to iJanaagraha, by Jaagte Raho! Coordinator Jasmine Shah, I was struck by the amount of geographic and ward data that Bangalore based Not-for-profit Janaagraha wanted to publish. That was the time when Data.Gov was live and developers all around the world were going crazy. I was wondering at the potential of IJ as a developer platform and not just as a social network. It was time to stop wondering and start working towards it.

As you know the biggest inspiration for us was data.gov and data.gov.uk. where the government of US and UK share the raw government data for developers to use. Using data provided by the government, there has been mashups like flyOnTime, visualization of health records and many more interesting and helpful applications.

For example Janaagraha’s Ward Infrastructure and Assessment (WISA) project has ranking data for each of the wards. Think about an application which maps WISA data to land/rent costs in that area. I guess it will be of great help when you want to choose your neighborhood. So it makes much sense to expose the data.

We are still in the early phase of developing the data and map APIs. As much as I want all kind of APIs exposed, I will have to keep check due to available resources. We will start with exposing OpenSocial and limited WISA data. That will probably serve as a pilot. If we find that developers are using the data in a useful way we could get the rest of the data and maps.

Above all IJ is social network which gives information, tools and network to socialites. It provides OpenSocial platform for external developers to launch relevant tools on IJ. Hence in a way, we are providing both a platform and data for interested developers to add those additional functionalities that we haven’t even dreamnt of. Now I am just waiting for the launch.

– Thejesh G N –

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Thejesh is the Technology and Community Manager at Janaagraha. He can be contacted at thej@janaagraha.org