Vasanth Vaidyanathan's Blog

My cricketing dream ended long back, but why a blog now? Because blogs did not exist then :-)

This happened one evening almost 20 years back in Chennai. I was playing with a bunch of friends...all kids then :-) Of course, we all played in our own street. This is professionally called "street-cricket" or "gully-cricket" these days. We had to bowl first and I clearly remember we were able to contain the opposing team's score. And then we had our chance to bat. I don't remember whether I opened our innings or not, but I knew I had the herculean task of taking my team to victory. And I did blast off. Not far into the game, I thought I really made 4 runs...(the ball should reach the end of the road for me to score a four). But alas, the ball went with such a force towards the boundary that it toppled a full can of milk. It was outside our neighbour's house and the milkman was milking the cow and apparently he had just completed milking the cow. Under 5 seconds, all of us disappeared from the road. Actually we went hiding. We did not come out for a full one hour. By then the milkman had gone, and so was the cow. Of course, I did hear our neighbours talking in hushed tones about who could have actually toppled the can of milk.

Our family moved out of the area, and until today I have not revealed this secret to anyone. There ended my dream of playing cricket. I remembered all this when a wave of nostalgia hit me as we played cricket last week as part of IEC sports day. Good old days, eh?

The world celebrates the 120th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the math genius today (December 22)!

Quoting wikipedia:

• Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3900 results (mostly identities and equations) during his short lifetime
• Ramanujan's formulae have found applications in the field of crystallography and in string theory
• Mr. Ramanujan's methods were so terse and novel and his presentation so lack in clearness and precision, that the ordinary [mathematical reader], unaccustomed to such intellectual gymnastics, could hardly follow him
• Ramanujan is generally hailed as an all time great, like Euler, Gauss or Jacobi, for his natural mathematical genius

Who is the IEC chess runner up? Find out in this interaction between "threereasons" and "pennyarcade".

The IEC Eveninger reported thus:

The GPD team led by Geetha and Padmaja "carromed out" the opposition to win the Carrom Doubles championship this evening. The run up to the finals included defeating strong teams. Ragunath and Rahim, also from IPG tried their chance yesterday but luck was not in their favor. Congrats Geetha and Padmaja. Incidentally, Geetha is also the winner of this year's badminton championship.

I could not attend the session, but I saw reports and heard from those who attended - Ragunath was at his best! He just rocked, and those who attended his session found it really useful. The number of people who attended (50+) is the highest turnout for any meetup! Good job, Ragunath.

• Link to meetup announcement
• Link to meeting minutes

In the second part of the session, Rajdeep talked about "Humor in technical writing".

Those who attended the meetup had this to say:

Naveen kumar  
"Truely professional. They shared their thoughts and experience. Ther ideas, efforts and concern towards 'future changes' was really appreciable [sic]. It will definitely help future of Technical writing ."

Shashi Prabha  
"Both the sessions were great! . I felt I learnt a lot today. Looking forward to attend more such informative sessions :-)"

Click here for more information. Remember, TW meetup is a "members only" site. But you can become a member.

Catch your favorite players in action: Discussing, planning, strategizing...

and of course, playing!

Catch all the cricketing action right here...

Credit for shooting many of these pictures go to Rahim.

Newspapers were busy writing obituaries for IPG cricket team. But the team hopes to make it big in an upcoming tour, and definitely go for the trophy next year.

The IEC Post mentioned:

IPG's cricketing dream ended today as Masterblasters failed to blast off. Inspite of a promising score of 93 runs in the first round, the team failed to perform today. The fans were a disappointed lot. The team hopes to start training the juniors and make it to the finals for next year.

A related story from Sports Mirror:

The indomitable spirit of "GPD Sizzlers" was put to test this morning when they played with "Sydney Sledgers". Sizzlers just fizzled out! Several top order and star batsmen got out without opening their accounts. The captain and rest of the team were not reachable when they were last contacted.

According to unconfirmed sources, the team was secretly taken outside the venue with heavy police protection.

I got a chance to meet with some MCA final year students yesterday. They wanted to find out if they could do their final year projects at Sun. I talked to them about some open source projects (NetBeans, OpenOffice, OpenJDK) and told them how they can start contributing code or documentation to these projects. Anything counts as contribution - a simple bug fix, an FAQ, or a small troubleshooting article. Further, by contributing to open source, the students are exposed to state of the art software and documentation. These skills would certainly come handy when they apply for jobs. I talked to them about another aspect - today, software development does not happen in the close confines of an office. It happens everywhere, and companies should just nurture these big developer communities. The students are more exposed to the latest technologies, and they need to keep the faculty updated about the industry scenario.

So students - contribute to open source projects, and make it your final year project!

Christmas Tree (ground floor reception area, IEC)

In yet another stunning performance, "IPG Masterblasters" beat "Blisters" by over 40 runs! Hemadri captained the team for IPG and led the team to victory. Everyone in the team contributed their bit. Now, the team will battle it out with "Crickets" at 1 pm. Once again, the venue is Corporation Ground, Shanthi Nagar.

Traffic restrictions :-)

Heavy crowd is anticipated. Only vehicles with green color passes can drive in to O'Shaugnessy road. Remember, you can only drive into O'Shaugnessy road from Langford road side. Special parking is arranged all around the corporation playground. If you have 'Divyasree' stickers, you may park your car in the IEC basement area. You can also try to park in the space adjoining hockey stadium. Langford Town area has been cardoned off for general purpose vehicles.

Important note :-)

Spectators who want to get autograph from the star batsmen are allowed to meet them only at 2pm (after the end of the game). If you would like to talk to the batsmen, please come during practice hours.

GPD Team-1 or GPD Sizzlers qualified for the next round by defeating "The Rock". GPD sizzlers will battle it out with "Sydney Sledgers" tomorrow (Dec 18) at 12 Noon. Venue: Shanti Nagar Corporation Play Ground. The captain of the Sizzlers team, Nilesh Parmar felt that the boys just played their natural game.

                                                                                Image courtesy: Gameguru.in

Note: Since the crowd is expected to be heavy tomorrow, only those cars with yellow passes are allowed to enter O'Shaugnessy Road and park near the corporation ground :-)

Looking for a community driven platform for producing and distributing educational materials? Click here.

You can contribute to SELF through:

• Material creation
• Testing
• Localization
• Translation

There was a session on SELF in the recently concluded FOSS.IN. I have not tried this, though.

I created a twitter account. Regular updates from me should keep coming on the right-hand side bar of my blog - "What am I doing?"

Follow me here: http://twitter.com/hi_vasanth

Are you worried you missed all the FOSS.IN action? Well, just don't...

To get the best moments of FOSS.IN 2007 before your eyes right now, click on this link:

http://blogs.sun.com/fossin/entry/the_best_of_foss_in