Boatman on the Tonle Sap, Cambodia, December 2005.

The Tonlé Sap occupies a great depression formed when the Indian subcontinent collided with Asia. For most of the year it is a shallow river, barely a metre deep, but come monsoon and the lake is now five times in area and the river flowing in reverse, bringing in water from the Mekong downstream. Flooded fields become excellent fisheries, supporting over three million people. When the monsoon abates and water flows out, a rich agricultural sediment is left behind. Entire villages are built on stilts in these fields around the lake’s periphery.

I spent two glorious days exploring the ruins of Angkor in December 2005. When done with the temples the second day, I set out to explore the floating village bordering Siem Reap on the Tonlé Sap. My boatman did not speak any English, but his twelve-year old son Chit did. Chit attended floating school, 3rd standard, 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM and served as tour guide after. He proudly pointed at his school as we went past it.

When I left Cambodia the next morning, I promised my hosts I would visit again. Two days is way too short for such a beautiful country.

You’ve no doubt heard of scanR by now, a service that takes phone camera images of documents or whiteboards, cleans them up, and returns them via fax or email in PDF format.

In my testing however, the alternative service Clicktoscan responds faster and produces a more readable image. Unlike scanR, it also accepts low resolution and grayscale images. Try it out.

Reggae band T-Bone performs at Saxophone Pub, Bangkok, December 2005.

In December 2005, I spent two weeks wandering around the streets of Bangkok. I was being decidedly unadventurous, restricting myself to visiting street markets, shopping malls, foreign embassies and some historical sights, all in the name of experiencing local culture.

Then Klaikong decided to give me a taste of local hospitality too, and suggested attending a concert. I expected the Bangkok equivalent of Bangalore’s Palace Grounds, a large open field with temporary stage and sound arrangements. Instead we landed at this place called Saxophone Pub at Victory Monument, where popular reggae band T-Bone was playing that evening.

Not only were they very good, I was also impressed by the ambience at the pub. The typical live music-in-restaurant arrangement I’ve seen anywhere in India keeps a clear separation between performers and patrons. At Saxophone, as you can see in this picture, this is not the case. We were seated on the upper floor from where we had a great view of the scene.

At Sree Math, Hariharapura, Chikmagalur District, Karnataka, October 2005.

Priests relax after a long ceremony at the Sree Math in Hariharapura.

The math (alt. spelling “mutt”) is ancient, dating back to the 15^th century. The place at that time was called Kapalam and later renamed Hariharapura, after Harihara, one of the legendary founding brothers of the Vijayanagar empire.

Hariharapura is about 20km along NH13 from Sringeri, site of a far more prominent math. Both maths are located along the river Tunga. The Tunga eventually merges with the Bhadra to become Tungabhadra, which in turn flows into the Krishna, eventually reaching the Bay of Bengal.

At Mahiti Infotech, Domlur, Bangalore, November 2004.

For at least the first half of this decade, Mahiti operated as a low-margin technology services provider to non-profits, primarily in the form of building web sites.

Because of the unusual nature of this operation in a soaring economy, Mahiti had to keep costs low — including employees’ pay, use open source everywhere, and focus on pioneering use of rapid development technologies.

An entire generation of computer programmers found their footing in the industry at Mahiti. Most moved on to better paying jobs. I trained one batch in 2001 and subsequently worked with some of them at other companies. Mahiti’s “graduates” are now to be found at pretty much every Zope and Plone company in India. Mahiti continues to rock on, now even organising events worldwide, and still seeing rapid turnover in their staff.

Welcome to revision 3 of this site. This is the first time the underlying platform has changed in six years. If you’re into a spot of historical sightseeing, the Wayback Machine has snapshots of the first incarnation in 2000, new domain in 2001, revised design in 2002, embedded journal in 2003, and last snapshot in 2005 (some of these are several months later than when the change occurred). The old site is, for now, still accessible at old.jace.seacrow.com. It may not stay forever.

This new revision is built with Plone 2.5, keeps the old design, and features two new blogs, this main one and a photoblog. The existing LiveJournal account also continues to be active. I’m not sure how I’ll split posts between the two, so this is somewhat experimental. There will be no cross-posting.

I’m in the process of migrating content over from the old site and setting up redirects where URLs have changed. Most of it has made it across, but pictures notably remain. Notes on this revision’s architecture and issues faced in deployment are coming up in a separate post.

Please join the housewarming party: commenting is now open.

Sunday Jam is a free rock concert held on the first Sunday of each month in Bangalore. The events lead up to Freedom Jam, an annual all night event on August 14. Both Sunday Jam and Freedom Jam serve as a platform for upcoming bands to find their audience (and often their voice). As a result the quality isn’t very high, but there are occasional gems.

This month’s special feature was Carnatic-Jazz musician Guitar Prasanna who performed several tracks from his new album Electric Ganesha Land.

The events are organised by Guruskool Music. See the full set of pictures at Flickr →