Author: Pradeep

  • Hello world!

    The United States is celebrating its independence day today. I am embarking on yet another blog. My first blog had my name on it and was on Blogspot. It was a Tibetan blog talking about alternative services to those provided by Google that first turned my attention to WordPress. I have since used Drupal, Tumblr, Vox, LiveJournal and the self-hosted WordPress. At the end I am back here again.

    It has been a journey where I have learnt a lot. In the meanwhile, I moved away from being a mechanical engineering undergrad to being a banker. No MBAs were involved. In the end, I use my most favourite of the names of blogs I have used thus far.

    Parallel Spirals is my imagination of how I see myself following these various parallel interests that I spiral down into once in a while.

  • And the rains come marching in

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  • 6 Month Anniversary

    Yesterday, we crossed the 6 month anniversary to our marriage.

  • Between Political Democracy and Protests

    Ethan Zuckerman spoke at re:publica2015 at Berlin on May 1, 2015, where among various things he mentioned how we’re treading the middle ground between political democracy and protest movements after various rounds of success and failures under each.

    If you’re too lazy to watch the whole video or on low bandwidth or just love to read, you can read his own writing about the talk here.

  • Our Tulsi plant

    Our neighbours had lent out the flat for rent. The aunty staying there (Raji aunty) had given us her Tulsi plant when she moved to Chennai. Because of our constant care and attention, two out of the three shoots withered. We then went to Babu Anand Farms to ask what would have caused the shoots to wither. He said, it may be because of the lack of nitrogen in the ceramic pot in which we had kept the shoots. He suggested that we replace the soil along with some natural fertilizers like coco soil and manure.

    Tulsi

    Dhanya putting in the new soil along with the natural fertilizers
    Dhanya putting in the new soil along with the natural fertilizers

    We’re still trying to recover the last shoot although we have added a Rama Tulsi that we obtained from the farm along with the last shoot. Awaiting results.

  • RC Planes and the Cansat competition

    In 2009, whilst I was involved with SEDS-India, we had initiated a cansat competition at our chapter in Vellore Institute of Technology. The next year on a team at IIIT-Hyderabad won the international cansat competition, a feat they repeated the next year. I have been thinking up ideas of how to make a reasonable cansat competition in India, given the restriction on launch of amateur rockets to expand the popularity of cansats beyond these pockets.

    Given this background, I wanted to attend this introductiory talk to a workshop on aeromodelling and RC Planes given by a member of the Aeromodelling club at VJTI, Mitali Shah.The workshop is slated to run through weekends on Sunday at Maker’s Asylum in One Indiabulls Center from April 4.

    At the time that I was doing engineering, there were several co-working and hackerspaces being developed in Mumbai. The advent of MAKE magazine in the US in 2005 brought on what was being touted as the maker movement. This saw the advent of makerspaces along the same lines as the hackerspaces. Maker’s Asylum is one such makerspace that has been evolving as part of this global maker movement. This is a welcome experiment among a group of models being tried out by people in India to see what works and what does not.

    The talk today consisted of introducing the workshop which begins on April 4. The workshop is to include a day of theory lessons and then nearly 2 days of practical build sessions and flight at Mahalaxmi Race Course (one of the few sites in Mumbai which has permission to fly RC planes). I also heard talk of developing a wind tunnel and how accessibility would be much easier compared to getting hold of wind tunnels in colleges like VJTI and IIT in Mumbai.

    During the talk it struck me that RC planes are good candidates to carry cansats for their drop.

    Let me take you back to what is involved in a cansat competition. An amateur rocket is used to carry and deliver the cansat at a predestined point and left to descent along a parabolic path. At the competition we held in VIT, we launched the cansat from atop a building complex. With amateur rockets being severely restricted and RC planes having a relatively easier access profile than amateur rockets, it would make a great carrier plane for cansats. It would be something akin to the way Virgin Galactic plans to launch its rockets.

    After her talk, I spoke to Mitali and she confirmed that RC planes would be able to carry cansats comfortably.

    A cansat competition in India could thus be done as a part of RC planes competition already being held in the country or independently in collaboration with aeromodelling clubs replacing the amateur rockets. RC planes would carry the payload to a designated height and release it. The cansat would then after a few seconds of free flight would then parachute down where they could meet the data requirements sought in the competition. After touchdown, teams would have to search for cansats by fox hunting, which are currently done by amateur radio enthusiasts in Mumbai.

  • Hobbies through the Ages

    As part of reducing focus that I carried out last year offline, I had listed through all the hobbies that I wanted to dabble in. They are, in no particular order:

    • cartographer
    • astronomer
    • ham (amateur radio)
    • robotics
    • collecting stamps
    • collecting coins
    • travelling – hiking
    • bicycling
    • amateur weather station
    • setting up a decimeter radio telescope
    • amateur rocketeer
    • writing a novel
    • contributing code to open source projects
    • blogging
    • playing the violin
    • religious philosophy
    • political sciences
    • data sciences
    • geographic information systems
    • minimalism
    • writing Malayalam
    • learning Sanskrit

    I have found in each case, that I have dabbled in it to some extent without going through with it completely and it seems like a nice list from which to begin working my way through. I still have the rest of my life to go through that list.

  • Valentine’s Day

    I got my first Valentine’s Day card handmade by my wife a little after the clock struck 12 early today morning.

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  • Has my search for the Yakkara Desam Fort ended?

    While participating in Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 in India, I had come across a feature called the Yakkara Desam Fort in Palakkad District. I came across this feature while compiling the list of monuments from the list provided by the Archaeological Survey of India. The Fort found mention in the list for Kerala as N-KL-6. Search as I might, I could not find mention of this monument anywhere else. Even Wikipedia did not have an article on the said Fort.

    While searching for a place to go around in Kerala, I stumbled on the website of the Town Planning Department, Kerala. Here, I was able to see the fort mentioned again in a document notifying protected monuments in Kerala within town limits. It also contained a link to the drawing of the Fort which can only imply that it is the Yakarra Desam as there is no other fort in the list.  So, I guess that my search for what is the Yakarra Desam fort has ended with conclusive documentary evidence. Case closed?

  • A Federated Wikipedia?

    Matt Mullenweg shared this article by Jon Udell on the ossification in Wikipedia. Being a part of the Wikimedian community from 2010 to about 2014, I have seen this crystalize on Wikipedia and in the world in general.

    Things are a lot worse offline amongst the community – on phone calls, emails and mailing lists. This led to me curtailing offline contributions and contributing edits when I feel like it. Not the best outcome for a community that is trying to retain its members.