PhD in Family

My brother Arulalan, completed his PhD IIT Delhi. It was a very long path for him with tons of sacrifices. All the efforts are worth as he is the first PhD in our family. I think he is first in our street, in our generation. May many get inspired from his works and get more PhD researchers.

He works for India Meteorological Department 

Hoping to see him on TV shows and news explaining weather situations soon. Please give more leaves.

TNPSC Group 2A in Family

My another brother Suresh, got selected in TNPSC group 2A. Already he is a group 4 employee. On his efforts to get into good roles, he puts tons of efforts on exams. Hoping to see him even great roles soon and to train many people to get into govt jobs.

PhD in Family

My brother Arulalan, completed his PhD IIT Delhi. It was a very long path for him with tons of sacrifices. All the efforts are worth as he is the first PhD in our family. I think he is first in our street, in our generation. May many get inspired from his works and get more PhD researchers.

He works for India Meteorological Department 

Hoping to see him on TV shows and news explaining weather situations soon. Please give more leaves.

TNPSC Group 2A in Family

My another brother Suresh, got selected in TNPSC group 2A. Already he is a group 4 employee. On his efforts to get into good roles, he puts tons of efforts on exams. Hoping to see him even great roles soon and to train many people to get into govt jobs.

Hello Reader,

Last week went with a grant beginning of online Python Training, Salsa Dance event and a visit to Toronto Zoo.

• We announced a free python course in Tamil at https://kaniyam.com/python-course-2024/ It went viral somehow. Created a whatsapp group for participants. within a day 1024 members joined and its limit was reached. Went with second and third whatsapp group. Thanks for Writer NChokkan and other who shared the news about the class.

• We explored on what online platform to use to hold 1000+ participants. Meet.jit.is is my favorite as it is Free/OpenSource. But, we need huge infra to self host. There was no time to experiment on that. MS Teams is cheapest. But, Wanted to be away from it. Explored Google Meet. Finally Zoom wins with its Webinar mode, which can hold 1000+ people.

• Mr. Asokan from TalentSprint.com, the one who introduced Python in ilugc meets around 2005, donated the zoom service for the training.

• On the first day, we got 550+ participants. So happy to address to such huge audience.

• Thanks to the trainer Syed Jafer, TalentSprint.com and the participants for making a massive event.

• On the whatsapp groups, people started to post “hi, hello, good morning, I am ABC from XYZ” etc. Muted the group and made them as announcement only groups.

• Asked all the participants to create a blog account at https://dev.to and started to aggregate all their blogs at my FreshRSS running on my desktop in my home. Read ll their writings at https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/ Reading their blogs is really interesting. 76 students provided their blogs so far. Will continue asking them to write blogs daily.

• Its a mixed crowd. Electrical/Mechanical/Home making/Baking/PhD Scholars/Designers/Students are attending. Hope ‘A byte of python’ will change their life.

• Asokan explained to me and syed on how to train beginners. Got many insights on the training side.

• Last week, had a discussion with MalaiKannan on Linux, Linux Users Groups, Kaniyam, Tamil Computing, Ebooks, ML/AI etc. Today he published the talk on his youtube channel “Malai Talks” . See it here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQTdMK2mw Shhh. It is a 2 hrs talk. Get prepared to hear long stories.

• Sivaprabu, a friend from ilugc, shared a small clip of him seeing the talk on big TV. So happy

• Last Saturday was fun with Salsa Dance Festival 2024 at Toronto. Visited a local library there, as went earlier. Then, danced with Nithya and kids along with 1000s of people. See here for a glimpses of the festival – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTIuHji1qYU&t=1582s ( Got it online )

• Here is a small clip of me and Nithya dancing https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/clips/video/salsa-dance.mp4.html Thanks to HeartComonos team here for teaching me salsa dance.

• On Sunday, went to Toronto Zoo. Saw Lion, Chimpanzee, Tiger and more animals. Never seen a tiger that closer so far. Kids enjoyed seeing them all. See a small clip of how close we saw the tiger, here – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/clips/video/tiger-at-toronto-zoo-with-cubs.mp4.html

See you all in next weekly notes. if you are writing blogs, reply here. Will follow and read them. Blogs and RSS feeds are best alternate to the social media platforms filled with advertisements and random paid contents.

Hello Reader,

Last week went with a grant beginning of online Python Training, Salsa Dance event and a visit to Toronto Zoo.

• We announced a free python course in Tamil at https://kaniyam.com/python-course-2024/ It went viral somehow. Created a whatsapp group for participants. within a day 1024 members joined and its limit was reached. Went with second and third whatsapp group. Thanks for Writer NChokkan and other who shared the news about the class.

• We explored on what online platform to use to hold 1000+ participants. Meet.jit.is is my favorite as it is Free/OpenSource. But, we need huge infra to self host. There was no time to experiment on that. MS Teams is cheapest. But, Wanted to be away from it. Explored Google Meet. Finally Zoom wins with its Webinar mode, which can hold 1000+ people.

• Mr. Asokan from TalentSprint.com, the one who introduced Python in ilugc meets around 2005, donated the zoom service for the training.

• On the first day, we got 550+ participants. So happy to address to such huge audience.

• Thanks to the trainer Syed Jafer, TalentSprint.com and the participants for making a massive event.

• On the whatsapp groups, people started to post “hi, hello, good morning, I am ABC from XYZ” etc. Muted the group and made them as announcement only groups.

• Asked all the participants to create a blog account at https://dev.to and started to aggregate all their blogs at my FreshRSS running on my desktop in my home. Read ll their writings at https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/ Reading their blogs is really interesting. 76 students provided their blogs so far. Will continue asking them to write blogs daily.

• Its a mixed crowd. Electrical/Mechanical/Home making/Baking/PhD Scholars/Designers/Students are attending. Hope ‘A byte of python’ will change their life.

• Asokan explained to me and syed on how to train beginners. Got many insights on the training side.

• Last week, had a discussion with MalaiKannan on Linux, Linux Users Groups, Kaniyam, Tamil Computing, Ebooks, ML/AI etc. Today he published the talk on his youtube channel “Malai Talks” . See it here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQTdMK2mw Shhh. It is a 2 hrs talk. Get prepared to hear long stories.

• Sivaprabu, a friend from ilugc, shared a small clip of him seeing the talk on big TV. So happy

• Last Saturday was fun with Salsa Dance Festival 2024 at Toronto. Visited a local library there, as went earlier. Then, danced with Nithya and kids along with 1000s of people. See here for a glimpses of the festival – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTIuHji1qYU&t=1582s ( Got it online )

• Here is a small clip of me and Nithya dancing https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/clips/video/salsa-dance.mp4.html Thanks to HeartComonos team here for teaching me salsa dance.

• On Sunday, went to Toronto Zoo. Saw Lion, Chimpanzee, Tiger and more animals. Never seen a tiger that closer so far. Kids enjoyed seeing them all. See a small clip of how close we saw the tiger, here – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/clips/video/tiger-at-toronto-zoo-with-cubs.mp4.html

See you all in next weekly notes. if you are writing blogs, reply here. Will follow and read them. Blogs and RSS feeds are best alternate to the social media platforms filled with advertisements and random paid contents.

Last week was an event full week.

• Last Thursday, at Heartcomonos,we had a potluck and drumming Jam. Went with friends, Nithya and kids. Good to see around 40 people. Few people came from Ukraine and other countries. Happy to see that heartcomonos is connecting local people, provides a friendly environment for all who miss the back home friends and relatives. The Drumming Jam was mesmerizing. Imagine 40 people are hitting hand drum with same rhythm. It induced the interesting learning drum. But, I remembered all the pending planned activities and a sleeping keyboard. In few months, I have to complete all the planned works and then only can explore the musical keyboard at home.

• Took few photos and videos of the event. With Darktable, I can mass edit, apply filters to all the photos. But video editing was always a nightmare for me. After exploring OpenShot, ShotCut, found that KDEnlive is an excellent tool for video editing. Though it asks efforts to learn it, the time and efforts are worth. we can all the video magics with it. Edited few event videos with kdenlive.

• Found good tamil video tutorials – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsQ_RnSTkSg&list=PLhPOYM1ZXzOFPb-tvIGxpykG4jicBnitI

  Thanks to Prasanna for making wonderful tutorial. Thanks for your beautiful cover images for FreeTamilEbooks.com too.

  With good tools and methods, we can really do things quickly. Started to like Kdenlive after Emacs. Feeling like Emacs is for text and Kdenlive is for Videos.

• Visited BAPS Swami narayana temple in Etobicoke. It has stunning architecture. Kids are seeing many gods for the first time. We discussed about various religions, faiths and rituals. They more they ask questions, the more I say as they are just stories.

• Our favorite Stand up Comedian, Alexander Babu was in Toronto, last week for a show “Alexperience”. Nithya attended it. She wrote a thanks note for the event in Facebook. Alex replied with thanks. Read it in Tamil here, https://www.facebook.com/nithya.duraisamy.7/posts/pfbid02wjuDsZpqSX8xcD9YXVRPSBYgw14vYCPgifoNxvFtF9vv1QzdANhX55oFJntVrmACl

• When Nithya went to the show, Myself and kids watched his show “Alex in Wonderland” in Amazon Prime. Don’t miss the show if you like Tamil movies and songs. Many songs and singers were spoken in the show. Watched those songs along with the kids. Kids wondered on Karnan Sivaji, Muthu Rajini etc. Demonstrated how ARR started new wave in tamil music, with different songs. We placed a water bottle on top of the woofer. As the songs go, the bottle started to move and fell down. Discussed few basic science behind it.

• Last Monday, celebrated Canada day with a day out and fireworks at night.

• Announced a free python course in tamil at Kaniyam.com Get more info at https://kaniyam.com/python-course-2024/

  Python is a crowd puller. Within a day, we got 540+ members in the whatsapp group. Looking for good online training platform to run the classes smoothly, with 100+ participants.

  Thanks Syed Jafar for providing the free training and Shyamala for initiating the training discussions. All started with a request in our forum – https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/need-python-tutor/1999

• Yesterday, Spoke at a podcast about kaniyam, LUGs, Saama and other activities. It will be released after editing soon.

• Wrote code to find the unused kubernetes deployments by the loadbalancer’s request count and mapping with the Route53 entries. Programming is the best drug to be immersed, next to reading books.
• Playing with airflow on kubernetes for its performance fine tuning.

Interesting weeks are ahead. Will share more news as they happen. Do you write blogs? Reply here with your blog URL. I will follow them.

I feel like reading blogs are more peaceful than any other social media.

Last week was an event full week.

• Last Thursday, at Heartcomonos,we had a potluck and drumming Jam. Went with friends, Nithya and kids. Good to see around 40 people. Few people came from Ukraine and other countries. Happy to see that heartcomonos is connecting local people, provides a friendly environment for all who miss the back home friends and relatives. The Drumming Jam was mesmerizing. Imagine 40 people are hitting hand drum with same rhythm. It induced the interesting learning drum. But, I remembered all the pending planned activities and a sleeping keyboard. In few months, I have to complete all the planned works and then only can explore the musical keyboard at home.

• Took few photos and videos of the event. With Darktable, I can mass edit, apply filters to all the photos. But video editing was always a nightmare for me. After exploring OpenShot, ShotCut, found that KDEnlive is an excellent tool for video editing. Though it asks efforts to learn it, the time and efforts are worth. we can all the video magics with it. Edited few event videos with kdenlive.

• Found good tamil video tutorials – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsQ_RnSTkSg&list=PLhPOYM1ZXzOFPb-tvIGxpykG4jicBnitI

  Thanks to Prasanna for making wonderful tutorial. Thanks for your beautiful cover images for FreeTamilEbooks.com too.

  With good tools and methods, we can really do things quickly. Started to like Kdenlive after Emacs. Feeling like Emacs is for text and Kdenlive is for Videos.

• Visited BAPS Swami narayana temple in Etobicoke. It has stunning architecture. Kids are seeing many gods for the first time. We discussed about various religions, faiths and rituals. They more they ask questions, the more I say as they are just stories.

• Our favorite Stand up Comedian, Alexander Babu was in Toronto, last week for a show “Alexperience”. Nithya attended it. She wrote a thanks note for the event in Facebook. Alex replied with thanks. Read it in Tamil here, https://www.facebook.com/nithya.duraisamy.7/posts/pfbid02wjuDsZpqSX8xcD9YXVRPSBYgw14vYCPgifoNxvFtF9vv1QzdANhX55oFJntVrmACl

• When Nithya went to the show, Myself and kids watched his show “Alex in Wonderland” in Amazon Prime. Don’t miss the show if you like Tamil movies and songs. Many songs and singers were spoken in the show. Watched those songs along with the kids. Kids wondered on Karnan Sivaji, Muthu Rajini etc. Demonstrated how ARR started new wave in tamil music, with different songs. We placed a water bottle on top of the woofer. As the songs go, the bottle started to move and fell down. Discussed few basic science behind it.

• Last Monday, celebrated Canada day with a day out and fireworks at night.

• Announced a free python course in tamil at Kaniyam.com Get more info at https://kaniyam.com/python-course-2024/

  Python is a crowd puller. Within a day, we got 540+ members in the whatsapp group. Looking for good online training platform to run the classes smoothly, with 100+ participants.

  Thanks Syed Jafar for providing the free training and Shyamala for initiating the training discussions. All started with a request in our forum – https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/need-python-tutor/1999

• Yesterday, Spoke at a podcast about kaniyam, LUGs, Saama and other activities. It will be released after editing soon.

• Wrote code to find the unused kubernetes deployments by the loadbalancer’s request count and mapping with the Route53 entries. Programming is the best drug to be immersed, next to reading books.
• Playing with airflow on kubernetes for its performance fine tuning.

Interesting weeks are ahead. Will share more news as they happen. Do you write blogs? Reply here with your blog URL. I will follow them.

I feel like reading blogs are more peaceful than any other social media.

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading this blog and encouraging me to write more. It has been a while since my last weekly notes. Sometimes, life so eventful that I miss to document them.

For past few months, I am super busy with work, reading, summer and more.

Here are few notes from my daily journal.

• Gave an online talk on “Daily life at a IT company” in Tamil. Spoke about various departments, their activities, the problems they all solve. Check the slides here – https://archive.org/details/look-inside-it-company

  See the video in Tamil here – https://youtu.be/gyT11vOKEEg

• Nithya gave a talk at an online seminar arranged by the college she studied “Sri Sankara arts & science collge, kanchipuram” along with her friend Brinda, on “Reent trends on IT”.
• Completed reading the Tamil Translation of the book “The Origin” by Don Brown. It was a 800+ pages book. Translation was very good. Never felt like reading a translation book. Don’s writings show a magical world in front of our eyes, all with plain text. In this novel, he questions on religions, god, power, greed and shows the possibilities of AI bots ruling the future of human. Dont miss to read this, if you like to spend few days to weeks on a new world.
• I use WordPress to host few websites for friends. When the hosting company moved their servers to another vendors, lost those sites. Learnt the necessary of backups of the websites in a hard way. The cloud team of annaitech.in helped to restore few sites from their backup. They recreated few websites as fresh. started to use https://managewp.com/ to have backups for all wordpress sites.
• Visited High park, toronto with family. Kids enjoyed a lot. Saw the animal Llama for the first time.
• Summer is here finally. Spending good times with children on weekends. Dining at park benches are awesome.
• Viyan is grown. I am playing shuttle with him. Talking with him on various subjects like women rights, religion , science, history, castes, reservations, why Tamilnadu is against hindi imposition etc. His questions are good. We both do research, read books, watch videos and learn together. If we answer the questions of kids on god honestly, we will become athests naturally.
• Tamil school for kids had a good annual day with cultural dances and songs. The efforts of people here to make the language alive are awesome.
• with KanchiLUG friends, we are writing python code for Tolkappym rules. We meet every saturday and discuss. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
• Mississauga city had an election for Mayor. Attended a meeting with a debate of 3 candidates with HeartComonos Team. Good to listen the politicians and local issues here.

• Started to collect sharable Tamil plain text data for LLM researches. Documenting the progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

  https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/ https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

• Announced an online course on machine learning in Tamil – https://kaniyam.com/ml-training-2024/ We are not getting enough participants. will wait for two more weeks and then will decide to go for it or cancel it.
• Happy to read weekly notes from Parathan, Stilanka – Read them here – https://weekly-notes.parathan.com/ His blog and a talk with Dinesh Parasakthi inspired me to resume the weekly notes here. Thanks for all who are motivating me in all the ways.
• Taking many photographs of people, nature and streets. But no time to process them all. Have to process them and upload to wikipedia commons.
• Watched few movies. When Viyan discussed about DNA, Cloning etc, watched the movie “Jurrassic Park”. Then, “Termininator 2”. Hope we will watch “The Matrix” soon. Enjoyed watching “Aavesham”, “Laapataa Ladies” , Jawaan, HotSpot, Manjummel Boys, Vasool Raja MBBS.
• Last weekend with with kids to a indoor Arcade game center. They enjoyed playing games with Arcade centers.
• From next week, kids get two month summer holidays. We will be living and working at library mostly.

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading this blog and encouraging me to write more. It has been a while since my last weekly notes. Sometimes, life so eventful that I miss to document them.

For past few months, I am super busy with work, reading, summer and more.

Here are few notes from my daily journal.

• Gave an online talk on “Daily life at a IT company” in Tamil. Spoke about various departments, their activities, the problems they all solve. Check the slides here – https://archive.org/details/look-inside-it-company

  See the video in Tamil here – https://youtu.be/gyT11vOKEEg

• Nithya gave a talk at an online seminar arranged by the college she studied “Sri Sankara arts & science collge, kanchipuram” along with her friend Brinda, on “Reent trends on IT”.
• Completed reading the Tamil Translation of the book “The Origin” by Don Brown. It was a 800+ pages book. Translation was very good. Never felt like reading a translation book. Don’s writings show a magical world in front of our eyes, all with plain text. In this novel, he questions on religions, god, power, greed and shows the possibilities of AI bots ruling the future of human. Dont miss to read this, if you like to spend few days to weeks on a new world.
• I use WordPress to host few websites for friends. When the hosting company moved their servers to another vendors, lost those sites. Learnt the necessary of backups of the websites in a hard way. The cloud team of annaitech.in helped to restore few sites from their backup. They recreated few websites as fresh. started to use https://managewp.com/ to have backups for all wordpress sites.
• Visited High park, toronto with family. Kids enjoyed a lot. Saw the animal Llama for the first time.
• Summer is here finally. Spending good times with children on weekends. Dining at park benches are awesome.
• Viyan is grown. I am playing shuttle with him. Talking with him on various subjects like women rights, religion , science, history, castes, reservations, why Tamilnadu is against hindi imposition etc. His questions are good. We both do research, read books, watch videos and learn together. If we answer the questions of kids on god honestly, we will become athests naturally.
• Tamil school for kids had a good annual day with cultural dances and songs. The efforts of people here to make the language alive are awesome.
• with KanchiLUG friends, we are writing python code for Tolkappym rules. We meet every saturday and discuss. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
• Mississauga city had an election for Mayor. Attended a meeting with a debate of 3 candidates with HeartComonos Team. Good to listen the politicians and local issues here.

• Started to collect sharable Tamil plain text data for LLM researches. Documenting the progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

  https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/ https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

• Announced an online course on machine learning in Tamil – https://kaniyam.com/ml-training-2024/ We are not getting enough participants. will wait for two more weeks and then will decide to go for it or cancel it.
• Happy to read weekly notes from Parathan, Stilanka – Read them here – https://weekly-notes.parathan.com/ His blog and a talk with Dinesh Parasakthi inspired me to resume the weekly notes here. Thanks for all who are motivating me in all the ways.
• Taking many photographs of people, nature and streets. But no time to process them all. Have to process them and upload to wikipedia commons.
• Watched few movies. When Viyan discussed about DNA, Cloning etc, watched the movie “Jurrassic Park”. Then, “Termininator 2”. Hope we will watch “The Matrix” soon. Enjoyed watching “Aavesham”, “Laapataa Ladies” , Jawaan, HotSpot, Manjummel Boys, Vasool Raja MBBS.
• Last weekend with with kids to a indoor Arcade game center. They enjoyed playing games with Arcade centers.
• From next week, kids get two month summer holidays. We will be living and working at library mostly.

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading this blog and encouraging me to write more. It has been a while since my last weekly notes. Sometimes, life so eventful that I miss documenting them.

For past few months, I am super busy with work, reading, summer and more.

Here are a few notes from my daily journal.

• Gave an online talk on “Daily life at an IT company” in Tamil. Spoke about various departments, their activities, the problems they all solve. Check the slides here – https://archive.org/details/look-inside-it-company

  See the video in Tamil here –

  https://youtu.be/gyT11vOKEEg

• Nithya gave a talk at an online seminar arranged by the college she studied “Sri Sankara arts & science college, kanchipuram” along with her friend Brinda, on “Recent trends on IT”.
• Completed reading the Tamil Translation of the book “The Origin” by Don Brown. It was a 800+ pages book. Translation was very good. Never felt like reading a translation book. Don’s writings show a magical world in front of our eyes, all with plain text. In this novel, he questions on religions, god, power, greed and shows the possibilities of AI bots ruling the future of human. Dont miss to read this, if you like to spend few days to weeks on a new world.
• I use WordPress to host few websites for friends. When the hosting company moved their servers to another vendors, lost those sites. Learnt the necessary of backups of the websites in a hard way. The cloud team of annaitech.in helped to restore few sites from their backup. They recreated few websites as fresh. Started to use https://managewp.com/ to have backups for all wordpress sites.
• Visited High park, Toronto with family. Kids enjoyed a lot. Saw the animal Llama for the first time.
• Summer is finally here. Spending good times with children on weekends. Dining at park benches are awesome.
• Viyan is grown. I am playing shuttle with him. Talking with him on various subjects like women rights, religion , science, history, castes, reservations, why Tamilnadu is against hindi imposition etc. His questions are good. We both do research, read books, watch videos and learn together. If we answer the questions of kids on god honestly, we will become atheists naturally.
• Tamil school for kids had a good annual day with cultural dances and songs. The efforts of people here to make the language alive are awesome.
• with KanchiLUG friends, we are writing python code for Tolkappym rules. We meet every saturday and discuss. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
• Mississauga city had an election for Mayor. Attended a meeting with a debate of 3 candidates with HeartComonos Team. Good to listen to the politicians and local issues here.
• Started to collect sharable Tamil plain text data for LLM researches. Documenting the progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

  https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

  https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

• Announced an online course on machine learning in Tamil – https://kaniyam.com/ml-training-2024/ We are not getting enough participants. Will wait for two more weeks and then will decide to go for it or cancel it.
• Happy to read weekly notes from Parathan, Stilanka – Read them here – https://weekly-notes.parathan.com/ His blog and a talk with Dinesh Parasakthi inspired me to resume the weekly notes here. Thanks for all who are motivating me in all the ways.
• Taking many photographs of people, nature and streets. But no time to process them all. Have to process them and upload to Wikipedia commons.
• Watched few movies. When Viyan discussed about DNA, Cloning etc, watched the movie “Jurassic Park”. Then, “Termininator 2”. Hope we will watch “The Matrix” soon. Enjoyed watching “Aavesham”, “Laapataa Ladies” , Jawaan, HotSpot, Manjummel Boys, Vasool Raja MBBS.
• Last weekend with with kids to an indoor Arcade game center. They enjoyed playing games with Arcade centers.
• From next week, kids get two month summer holidays. We will be living and working at the library mostly.

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading this blog and encouraging me to write more. It has been a while since my last weekly notes. Sometimes, life so eventful that I miss documenting them.

For past few months, I am super busy with work, reading, summer and more.

Here are a few notes from my daily journal.

• Gave an online talk on “Daily life at an IT company” in Tamil. Spoke about various departments, their activities, the problems they all solve. Check the slides here – https://archive.org/details/look-inside-it-company

  See the video in Tamil here –

  https://youtu.be/gyT11vOKEEg

• Nithya gave a talk at an online seminar arranged by the college she studied “Sri Sankara arts & science college, kanchipuram” along with her friend Brinda, on “Recent trends on IT”.
• Completed reading the Tamil Translation of the book “The Origin” by Don Brown. It was a 800+ pages book. Translation was very good. Never felt like reading a translation book. Don’s writings show a magical world in front of our eyes, all with plain text. In this novel, he questions on religions, god, power, greed and shows the possibilities of AI bots ruling the future of human. Dont miss to read this, if you like to spend few days to weeks on a new world.
• I use WordPress to host few websites for friends. When the hosting company moved their servers to another vendors, lost those sites. Learnt the necessary of backups of the websites in a hard way. The cloud team of annaitech.in helped to restore few sites from their backup. They recreated few websites as fresh. Started to use https://managewp.com/ to have backups for all wordpress sites.
• Visited High park, Toronto with family. Kids enjoyed a lot. Saw the animal Llama for the first time.
• Summer is finally here. Spending good times with children on weekends. Dining at park benches are awesome.
• Viyan is grown. I am playing shuttle with him. Talking with him on various subjects like women rights, religion , science, history, castes, reservations, why Tamilnadu is against hindi imposition etc. His questions are good. We both do research, read books, watch videos and learn together. If we answer the questions of kids on god honestly, we will become atheists naturally.
• Tamil school for kids had a good annual day with cultural dances and songs. The efforts of people here to make the language alive are awesome.
• with KanchiLUG friends, we are writing python code for Tolkappym rules. We meet every saturday and discuss. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
• Mississauga city had an election for Mayor. Attended a meeting with a debate of 3 candidates with HeartComonos Team. Good to listen to the politicians and local issues here.
• Started to collect sharable Tamil plain text data for LLM researches. Documenting the progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

  https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

  https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

• Announced an online course on machine learning in Tamil – https://kaniyam.com/ml-training-2024/ We are not getting enough participants. Will wait for two more weeks and then will decide to go for it or cancel it.
• Happy to read weekly notes from Parathan, Stilanka – Read them here – https://weekly-notes.parathan.com/ His blog and a talk with Dinesh Parasakthi inspired me to resume the weekly notes here. Thanks for all who are motivating me in all the ways.
• Taking many photographs of people, nature and streets. But no time to process them all. Have to process them and upload to Wikipedia commons.
• Watched few movies. When Viyan discussed about DNA, Cloning etc, watched the movie “Jurassic Park”. Then, “Termininator 2”. Hope we will watch “The Matrix” soon. Enjoyed watching “Aavesham”, “Laapataa Ladies” , Jawaan, HotSpot, Manjummel Boys, Vasool Raja MBBS.
• Last weekend with with kids to an indoor Arcade game center. They enjoyed playing games with Arcade centers.
• From next week, kids get two month summer holidays. We will be living and working at the library mostly.

Last week went on with reading, listening to podcasts, and programming.

Was listening to a few podcasts of Carl Newport and Jey Shetty on deep work and time management. Most of the contents I already knew from “Eat that Frog” and “Deep Work”. Many times, I need more inspiration and motivation to follow the things we already knew.

Still reading the books Origin and Emacs Field Guide.

Writing code to get many reports from AWS, with python and boto3 library.
Programming is exercise for the brain. The satisfaction of seeing the code working is always awesome.

Kids got a long weekend for Good Friday and Easter.

My brother suresh gave a few Tamil story Books and School Books for kids, from chennai through a friend. So happy to see the Tamil books. Kids started to read them.

Heart Comonos Team conducted two events for Easter. An event for kids and a Health Fair with Zumba. Danced with the team for a long time.

Viyan wanted a few interesting games to play. I asked him to try “Prince of Persia and Mario”. They are 20+ years old DOS games. He found them online and enjoyed playing for some time.

Watched the movies below.
– Terminator 2 Judgement Day
– Lover
– Parking

Lover and Parking are “not to miss” movies. Happy to see Tamil Film Industry is making movies with real life like moments and storylines.

Payilagam Team conducts summer classes for women and online react classes.
KanchiLUG team discussed Ledger CLI and Ledger Mode on Emacs.

Released one ebook about Madras/Chennai in Tamil. Download it here https://freetamilebooks.com/ebooks/madharasapattinam/

There are many books waiting to be released at FreeTamilEbooks.com
Check them at https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/Ebooks/issues
Reply here or mail to me ( tshrinivasan@gmail.com ) if you can contribute on ebook making.

Planning to download the old tamil books from “Endangered Archives Programme” https://eap.bl.uk/ and Google books. Working on automating the process.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/199

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/200

Check these issues and contribute.

The last two weeks went crazy.

Kids got a week of holidays to welcome spring.
We went to nearby small library and a very big central library.

Libraries had many events for kids and adults.
We missed few events as we were late few min for on spot registration.
We had good learnings too.

Payilagam team announced a free react class in Tamil.
Around 400 people registered.
We dont have purchased any online meeting platform yet.
Went with free google meet and youtube live.

Started to read the book “Harley Hahn’s Emacs Field Guide“
It introduces the history of Unix, terminals and then emacs.
I never thought a technical book will be full of history and fun.
If you get a chance to read it, dont miss it.

Upgraded my desktop with 2TB SSD hard disk and Ubuntu 23.10
Now my desktop is super fast. SSD makes the desktop experience awesome.

Sad to see many websites are disappearing from internet.
Maattru.com and TNCPIM.org were with good contents in creative commons license for many years.
But they disappeared due to various reasons.
Khaleel is working on restoring the site content from way back machine.
Thanks to archive.org for storing the internet’s content.

We celebrated Viyan’s birthday.
He is turning 10 this year.
Kids grow faster than we thought.
Invited all his friends and had a great kids gathering event last saturday.

Sunday, went to scarborough for a tamil literature meeting.
Tamil Writer Yuvan Chandrasekar is in Mississauga.
He gave a talk.
Kaalam Selvam released his 60th edition of the tamil magazine “Kaalam“
Happy to meet many Tamil literary people here.

Started reading the book “Origin” by Dan Brown in Tamil. Reading a non fiction after long time.
It is a 800 page novel. but the pages and hours are flying with the book. After this, will check for other novels by Dan Brown. Thanks for the translator senthil and publisher “Ethir Veliyedu” for bringing the nice work in Tamil.

My brother Arulalan received the “Best Employee Award” of India Meteorological Department (IMD) from the Honorable Union Minister of Earth Sciences Sh. Krien Rijiju in the presence of the Secretary of MoES Dr.M.Ravichandran and the DGM of IMD Dr.M.Mohapatra during the World Meteorological Day Celebration on 22.03.2024

Tons of wishes for him. I am proud of the passionate hard work and dedication.

• Writing documentation is one of my major office works. I am still trying to write better documents. Last week, stumbled on by a super, neat document on a work related process

my lead, mentor Navin Kumaran. He demonstrated how to make a brain dump notes to a industry grade document. Though he is encouraging me to write better, for more than 5 years, I have to improve a lot. Better writing brings better life for everyone. Writing is one of the high skills we have to get in the IT life.

• We had a Women’s day celebration at our home. Nithya’s friends came. They had a party with cake and dance.
• I took few videos of the dance party. Was looking for a simple video editing tool, to rotate the videos, trim, merge, reduce size by compressing etc. . It has been long time I worked with videos.

Usually, I work with ffmpeg on command line. Wanted to try some GUI tools. Kdenlive was new to me. Installed Davinci Resolve. It is huge. 5GB. It is not even opened on my computer. Tried Lightworks. The GUI is confusing. Finally found a simple GUI tool to compress. The name itself is “compress”. Available as snap here – https://snapcraft.io/compress-video It uses ffmpeg in backend. Used MP4Box to merge the compressed videos. Once done, used this https://github.com/rojenzaman/video-gallery-generator_bash script to generate a simple website to share it as a video gallery. Hosted it on my selfhosted desktop machine itself.

still Video editing is not easy for me. Command line tools are way simpler. Long live ffmpeg and MP4Box.

• Our online class on “Introduction to GNU/Linux in Tamil” completed last week. Thanks to Sathish, Sakhil and Dhanasekar for the great classes. Thanks for all the participants.

I am happy to read all their blogs. Here is the notes on the feedback of the class. https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/03/11/notes-from-feedback-on-online-training-on-gnu-linux/

• When teaching about SSH, I created user account on my desktop for all students and allowed them to do ssh and rsync. To make it simple, created a user called “student” and gave

the password as “student”. With this they logged in and explored about ssh. Then they used their own login. Unfortunately, I forgot to disable the user or change the password. Somebody or bots intruded into my desktop. I found that once my computer got dead slow. Found the issue and deleted the user and its home folder. Wrote about here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/03/10/my-linux-desktop-got-cracked-fixed-it/

• Spring started here. Cold winter is ending. Day light saving started. Kids got one week leave for the school. Today went to the library and brought some 30 books.

Libraries have many events for kids in this spring break. Hope will go there with kids.

• Kaniyam Foundation Canada team had our first in person meeting. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/Organization/wiki/Kaniyam-Foundation-Canada-Meeting-1-Minutes
• we started to collect Huge amount of tamil text data which are in open license. – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

Add your name and email there if you can contribute to this project. AI Tamilnadu team also starting a similar project called “Vidhai”. More hands will bring more outcome.

• Khaleel is working on restoring the contents of https://maattru.com/ and http://tncpim.org/ from way back machine. Sad to see many websites are disappearing from the internet,

due to various reasons. We have to keep the content live as much as possible.

• I am using https://managewp.com/ to have a monthly once free backup for all my wordpress sites. Found that few new websites missed it. Added to all of them.
• Thinking of organizing a monthly talk on ML/AI/LLM etc with all open source works and open data. Will release the data collected every month. Contact me if you can help

on organizing the events, finding the speakers, spreading the events etc.

• My friend is coming to Canada in few months. He asked many questions about the travel,checklist, life here. started to write the things I know here. Will publish as a free ebook soon.

https://github.com/tshrinivasan/newcomers-guide-to-toronto/blob/main/canada-life.org#travel-checklist Please share your thoughts to add. Inviting the co-authors. email to tshrinivasan@gmail.com to collaborate. As I completed just one year, will be missing many things. The thoughts of people here will help the make the book rich with content