Looking back at early accidents
When I look back at my short life I can see distinct periods or chapters. The time when I moved to Chennai and joined a new school in 3rd standard was the beginning of discovery that I could do well at studies and be competitive. During that stage I found my interest in science and technology and aptitude for various extra-curricular activities like quizzing, painting, essay-writing and such. Another parallel phase started in 5th standard when I stumbled upon my interest for computers and programming. In 6th standard I realized my potential in being a leader and continued to be the class representative for most of school life capping it with my role as a School Pupil leader in 12th std. All these phases happened more or less without any conscious effort on my part. They just happened. I lot of credit goes to my family and teachers for guiding me through these. The point however is that the phase transitions were by and large accidental from my point of view.

Hmm… Can we make accidents happen?
The first time when I consciously ushered in a new phase was in 11th std. An incident at school made me introspect and got me to start the process of understanding myself and people around me. What motivates us? What do we all want? What elevates us into happiness? What drops up into the abyss of sorrow? I learnt to control my anger and to think more rationally. I learnt to observe people around me and look behind the eyes. It taught me to empathize and connect. That was when I realized that I could decide what I could do and be – that future phases in life need not be accidental.

Life is a powerful force that keeps pushing you around. I have not met anyone who is in complete control. I don’t even believe complete control makes sense in the framework of life. At best we can attempt to understand the forces behind life and learn to go with the flow. Whether or not we can influence the direction of it, we can atleast benefit from the interaction. We can learn and become better at it – at understanding. The one thing I decided not to do was to get too comfortable. Learning happens when there is a differential current in the river of life.

Undergraduation was a new phase filled with freedom, learning and fun. As opposed to school where your peers come from your immediate locality, in college, you get to meet a more diverse set. You meet people who think differently and are motivated by various ends. In understanding them there was a great opportunity to discover more of myself which I did.

Veveo – my first workplace
After college I was confused about what to do. Do I pursue higher education or should I get a job? The companies coming to my campus for recruitment were Wipro, TCS, CTS, Infosys and so on. I work profile being offered did not excite me. Pursuing MS was the option I was considering and started the application process. At that time I came to know of a startup in Bangalore who were looking to hire freshers. Having set my mind on MS, I applied to this company half-heartedly, more to experience the interview process than anything else. I was interviewed by two people from the company one of them a co-founder and other a VP. What hooked me was the way they interacted with me. From my point of view they were experienced professionals working in the industry having etched out successful careers and I was a little no-body – a fresher from a private college. For the first time I felt I belonged somewhere and could establish a relationship based on mutual respect. I had always detested the authoritarian nature of our society. In schools and colleges I saw a lack of reciprocative respect from the faculty. Our society has a lot to learn in terms of treating each other humanely. Anyway, that’s that. I got hooked and told my family. Despite their concerns about this being a “small” company without “security”, I decided to dive in head long to discover the “insecurity” of being in a puny startup. Thus I joined Veveo.

Veveo was a very productive experience. I discovered startup culture and rediscovered myself. I walked up to the co-founder who interviewed me after getting my first paycheck and thanked him for paying me for having fun at work. That is a double scoop. I could not believe that was happening to me. For the first time in my life, I felt I belonged in a group. I found people who thought like me with whom I could share my ideas and I found other smart people who were so different that I would spend countless hours bludgeoning their logic (and getting bludgeoned too . The 4.5 years of experience at Veveo feels more than the sum of what I had experienced before. Phew! What a ride it has been. The day I quit Veveo, I found it difficult to justify my decision to do so. Even today the thought is not extinct.

What next?
Looking back I realize that I was getting too comfortable at Veveo. A good work environment, nice people and wonderful pay — yummy! Time for an adventure. I came up with an idea for making a physics simulation engine to aid game devs in creating awesome destructible environments. That was slightly more than a year back. I worked on it part-time in the evenings and weekends and then in March last year I requested my superior to release me so I could do it full-time. Much to my surprise he offered a part-time schedule where I could work at Veveo three days a week and spend the rest working on my project. This opportunity was god-sent and I lapped it up. A friend of mine from college who was also my roomie quit his job and joined me to work on this full-time.

The period since March last year is easily the most productive and exciting phase of my life. I have learnt immensely on a multitude of subjects – technology, project management, startup fundamentals, spirituality and philosophy, business development etc. The experience has altered me as a person and opened up avenues of my brain which I thought inexistent. I decided to take a plunge into this world full-time and took that step. I quit Veveo to work on this full-time from Jan this year. The journey so far would have been but a dream had it not been for support from my family, friends and colleagues at Veveo. Thank you all for being there.

Startups businesses are difficult beasts to tame and most people get flattened. The promise of glory (and $’s ) is a worthy lure for a persistent one. I intend to succeed doing this but failure is no less a success considering the path you tread and the things you experience. I will keep you posted in the forthcoming articles on this blog. A new chapter awaits.

Aliaser works by monitoring your bash history. It analyses command frequency and suggests candidates for aliasing. It manages aliases so created. The feature I like most in Aliaser is that it reminds you to use the aliases you created by showing tips on opening a new terminal session.

Download Aliaser from http://aliaser.googlecode.com.

Here are a couple of Marvin videos.

It has been a long break. A lot of things have happened since the last time I blogged. I finished college and got a job in a Tech start-up in Bangalore. Been here since then. I got married a few months back. My perspective towards technology has evolved since I left college. I’ve worked on a couple of interesting projects at work and it has been a roller-coaster ride.

Python has displaced Visual-Basic as my language of choice. I’ve finally succeeded in making the switch to Linux thanks to Ubuntu (I remember the pain of getting X to work in “Red Hat Linux” 5.x) and have not looked back since.

The company I work goes by the name “Veveo”. It is headquartered in Boston, USA. We are working on a powerful search technology for input-constrained devices like Mobile phones, Televisions etc. Our product “VTap” is scheduled to launch the 10th of September. At work I have been involved in building the web crawling infrastructure and It has been a wonderful experience. Many a naive notion I held has been quashed, especially that scalability is a non-issue. Even the simplest of algorithms/techniques often struggle to scale.

I am working on two projects at home. One is a game called “Lord of the bots” where participants write code to control “bots” and the other is “Mentat” which is about creating a highly user-friendly and accessible computer experience.

I will have more to say about these soon.

We chose this hill for several reasons

1) It is bigger than the one we went to last time

2) It is close as before to my place (in Maraimalai nagar)

3) We wanted to try out a hill with ample vegetation (although we were to have a particularly painful surprise later in the evening)

Aditya (my friend from Computer science department) and I went for a recon mission to check out a viable route to the location along with a place to leave the bikes and bags that we wouldn’t need on the hill. This was at 2:00 P.M.

After having found a comfortable route, we memorized the landmarks and the route and headed back to home-base (fancy! Well I like to dramatize) i.e to my place. We packed in all the stuff we would need like water bottles, matches, a frying-pan, spatula, egg-box, a pruning knife to make way for us on the hill, a digital camera to take snaps of us conquering the peak, kerosene, newspapers, piece of old cloth etc. Having done with the packing we started off on bike to meet the rest of the people (Vikraman, Sridhar, Sudheer, Jatin) at Guduvancheri bus-stop. We bought some eggs there and checked our torch-lights and then set off on two bikes to the location. You might be wondering how two bikes and six people went together, well, I should say, just like last time!

We parked the bikes in a house near to the foot of the hill (which reminds me of Vikraman who was quite eager to have a snap taken with the lady over there and would have gone on to do so had not her husband come out then). Then we started walking towards the hill. After a kilometer’s walk we got there.

We found a used track and decided to follow that instead of cutting right across the vegetation. We later thanked our past selves for having taken that decision because we found that the vegetation on the hill was not very friendly. In fact, at any attempt at friendly contact, they pricked us to hell . Most plants there were thorny and we found it increasingly hard to keep going and I would not blame Sudheer for being especially whiny and for constantly reminding us that we were out of our minds and for dragging him into hell’s drawing room! (Of course he was the happiest of the lot after the trek got over. He kept saying “Man, that was wonderful”. Although I suspect he was happy for other obvious reasons).

We labored hard for the next hour up the slope. Along the way we made many more friendly “contacts” with our vegetarian friends. We stopped only to take snaps and to check on the painful rewards that had been proffered us by them. I remember Vikraman exacting particularly venomous vengeance on one Cactus plant that dared prick him. He used the pruning knife liberally and did away with it.

Half-way up the hill we dropped the plan of reaching the hill top for various reasons like failing light, fear of vile reptiles and of course because we found no track.

We made a stone stove and collected dry twigs and started a fire to heat the pan. As soon as the pan got heated we started making omelets. That was real good fun. After eating them and getting various parts of our bodies singed we started the descent.

It was tough initially due to the steepness of the slope but after some time we got used to that and descended faster. Mid-way down the slope it grew dark and we switched on our torch lights but realized that the light they were producing would not do and until that realization came about we ran into some more of our vegetarian friends. Then we stopped and made a kerosene cloth torch with a stick that we cut out of a plant and wrapping the old cloth around it. We wetted the cloth with kerosene and put a burning match to it and Viola! – Light.

Feeling very much like primitive cave men, we got to the foot of the hill and found that we could not figure out the way out to the road. After a fifteen-minute period of utter confusion we happened upon one dirt track and following which we reached a spot we had been to before and instantly tracked it down to the house where we left our bikes.

The amused residents looked at us and the kerosene torch and I heard quite a few snickers around us. We said goodbye to them and biked it to the bus stop where out trek ended.

I almost forgot to mention that we found treasure on the hill. Well not gold nuggets and all but seeds! (Well, should not have said treasure – something interesting then). These were colored red and black and shaped like eggs. I have seen them being used as eyes in idols of Lord Vinayaka.

We scaled the hill in not more than half an hour and after some site-seeing and gasping at the wonderful sight of the surrounding. It gives you a sense of infinite elation to be at the top of a mountain (well well, a hill). I spent some time on a rock perched precariously on the edge of a cliff fancying myself to be Edmund Hillary on mount Everest’s peak!, besides trying Leonardo Dicaprio’s flying act on the Titanic which was great but for the fact that I had to suffice with Vikraman in place of Kate Winslet. Well maybe next time, just maybe it will turn out better.

I shouldn’t forget to mention how we made a fire and an improvised stove built with rocks and fed with dry twigs. We roasted some chicken pieces Tandoori style and spend the next hour blowing out fire where I suddenly felt like a fiery Horntail right out of a Harry Potter novel!

We took some snaps and I’ll put them up as soon as them come from the lab. It was a superb experience and am looking forward to the next one – maybe a ride on one of the many “catamarans” of the Marina. Now that promises to be even more fun (and I can do that Titanic thing again!).

So it all came down to me having to format C: and to re-install everything. I made a mental note never to mess with partitions (that is the 37th time!).

Well, so today’s lesson for everyone is “DO NOT MESS WITH PARTITIONS!”

There are two things that brought me back to blogging after the initial burst when my enthusiasm lead me to post 1 blog!

• In anticipation of a gmail account!
  
• because I still think it is cool
  

Well, as a start, let me introduce myself

I am Prashanth Ellina, a student of SRM Engineering College, Chennai, India. I am doing a B.Tech in Information technology and am in the final year now.

I like computer programming, keep up with tech news, reading science fiction and watching sf movies, am a fan of Isaac Asimov. I like talking about anything techy under the sun and about space flight, astronomy, interesting ways to spend time, fun things to do, cosmology, wars and weapons.

My favorite computer game is Civilization III. I spend days and days in front of my comp screwing the Germans to glory and of course my favorite civilization is India.

My academic interests include Robotics, Artificial intelligence, Neural computing, bio-inspired computing, Evolutionary computing, Genetic algorithms, Multi-agent systems etc.

My favorite movies are The Matrix trilogy, Independence day 4, Star wars and I can spend hours and hours just talking about the intricacies of the Matrix.

I code a lot in Visual basic and have just begun my foray into Linux and open source stuff which I think is really cool. I do take a lot of interest in what Microsoft( I used to say M$ before but stopped after hearing about the nice things they are doing from Sriram ) is upto. I am vastly interested in the upcoming Longhorn and ancillary technologies.

I need to credit Vivek srikumar for inspiring me to start blogging again.

That’s for now people.