I was born and brought up in Bengaluru(Bangalore). I did my schooling from Vijaya High School, National college, Jayanagar and my Undergraduate study in Mechanical Engineering from PES Institute of Technology.
I work for San Francisco based Change Congress, a non-partisan effort to end corruption in US congress. Change-congress is headed by Prof. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University.
I currently live in Carmel(a suburb of Indianapolis), Indiana, USA with my wife Nayana.
Open source
Though, I am a gearhead by training, I'm a computer geek by choice. My love of computers started just before I joined Engineering, and has remained strong ever since. My first contact with Linux (May 1997 edition of PCQuest magazine) was love-at-first-sight. Even though it took me another 4 months I got my hands on my first PC, I was hooked to Linux. I've been working with open source for more than 10 years now. I use Linux workstations and servers at home and office.
I have given talks at Linux Bangalore 2004 (on SQLite) and Linux Bangalore 2005 (on Plone).
Computers
My first introduction to computers was at the age of 14 (class IX). ZX-80 and the green glyps of BASIC code. Looking back, I was quite good at it, but did not have enough context to pursue it further beyond the summer course at the school.
The long gap between CET exams and commencement of classes at PESIT, propelled me and a couple of friends towards a friendly computer training institute in the summer/monsoon of '96. We learnt C on a 386 and spent hours writing programs to draw things on screen. #include graphics.h, was the most popular line. Turbo C, I remember you.
I learnt C++ from the very knowledgable Mr.Vijayan at the PPR program during 98-99. Mr.Vijayan was our first real "Geek" role-model ! (Just see the photo, it is very easy to make out who he is :) .
Python
I've been programming in python for more than 5 years now, after a few years with C/C++ (and Euphoria) in college. I'd like to believe that I've done a quite a few interesting things using python. From simple scripting to COM programming to Jython programming and web application development, Python has been a fun language to use. Teaching, esp teaching programming using Python is something I enjoy immensely. I often find excuses to spring a python on students and programmers alike, few of who are scarred by badly taught C/C++ and Java. There is still hope.
Reading
I'm an avid reader. I used to read anything and everything that I could lay my hands on. However, the coming of the *internet-s* has slowed me down considerably. I mostly read sci-fi, technology and Kannada books now-a-days. Asimov and Frank Herbert are my favourite sci-fi authors.
Babel
I'm a kannadiga by birth and I'm proud to be one. I immensly enjoy reading kannada books.
Hindi is another language I can manage with some fluency; mostly learnt by watching too many Doordarshan TV serials :).
I can understand other South Indian languages with various degrees of success. I know a smattering of Konkani too (ah! the challenges of wooing a Konkani girl :)
My name in three scripts [
Kannada,
Roman,
Devanagari]
Interests
I'm interested in Datamining/Machine learning algorithms and advanced visualisation techniques as applied to business analytics.
I support these causes and projects
Affiliations
- Sampada.net - Kannada literary community.
- KonkaniRecipes.com - my wife's recipe site. Recipes from Coastal Karnataka.
- Bangpypers - the online community of Bengaluru Python Users group
- OSBasket.com - you can buy Open Source software CDs here, including Openoffice.org and various flavours of GNU/Linux.