Maarg Chennai marathon 31-Aug-2008

I went for the 7km run (walk, actually) of the marathon organized by GiveLife Charity on 31-aug-2008. The charity is aimed at providing education for underprivileged children. Participating that event was fun. We went as a group involving children and some more people who are interested in sports. BTW, GiveLife charity is an NGO headed by Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi's daughter M. Kanimozhi.

It was quite crowded. I was quite happy to participate. There were quite a lot of school children with their school bands drumming. There were students doing pole walking. It was really a fun walking along with so much crowd. The event organization was better than what I expected. The traffic was diverted, there were quite a lot of security people on duty, there were ambulances for emergency care, etc. Good care was taken to avert stampede. But, the organizers failed miserably in providing water and sanitation facitilities. I saw a truck loaded with Aquafina water bottle cartons was swamped by young boys. They climbed the moving truck and picked the water bottles from cartons and passed on to the people. People were literally running for water!

Two things grasped my attention a lot. One made me feel good and the other made me feel terrible.

I heard three different conversations where some young students were talking out their despair and frustration in people throwing away plastics recklessly. The road was full of empty water bottles and packets. The Eco friendly awareness is certainly there in the young blood of Indians.

The next thing was heart breaking. There were small children aged less than 8, bare footed, picking up those plastics for their living. I have taken some photographs from my mobile and I'll upload that once I figure out how to upload into blog. The very reason for which this event was organized seems to be a terrible failure. The person who was compering was ecstatic in shouting "I love Chennai", "Yengal Chennai, Thanga Chennai (meaning Our Chennai is Golden Chennai)", etc. Amdist that he started shouting the corporate/companies/ personalities, etc like "The Hindu", "IOB", "Cavinkare", "SRM university", etc. I would call that event a success if they have registered atleast those rag pickers in schools !!


My Drupal took back burner over the last weekend. With Chennai marathon and some functions to attend, didn't get much time at all for Drupal. However, I did get bit of time to read Rajesh Setty's "Beyond Code". I didn't get much out of that book. Whatever he has said, I have read it in the Opportunity supplement of "The Hindu" news paper. I follow most of that as well!

Kung Fu Panda & my drupal

Sure, it is a great movie. Very entertaining. I recommend that movie for everyone who wants to relax. Children will enjoy a lot too.

I bought the Pro Drupal Development 2nd edition eBook (by John K. VanDyk) . It is quite good. I was really groping for information through the Drupal online documents and did not find the documents very easy.

Drupal - multisite configuration

In the weekend, I tried Drupal multisite configuration. It could have been so easy but I did struggle on one thing.

I kept on setting DocumentRoot to 'C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/htdocs/drupal-6.3/sites/testmultisite2' in the file httpd-vhosts.conf. However, it just needs to be set to the drupal installation root directory. Nowhere it is given explicitly and that created some confusion.

Chennai traffic

I'm really wondering why we - the people and the government, are not interested in maximizing the use of available space. Look at any road. There are thousand ways to maximize the available space. There is no lack of money power and knowledge power. I guess it is lack of will (or Dhill - in local slang, it means braveness) power.

Websites & Programming

I have got renewed interest in web based application designs and programming. I have been in the IT industry for more than 15 years. As I progressed in my career, I started working on pre-sales, product (Custom Off The Shelf or COTS) based implementations, customer interactions, solution architecture, project management and so on.

I'm getting into the details of JavaEE, Drupal, CSS, PHP for now. I'm planning to make some trial web sites.

To begin with, I'm planning to roll out a web site for pet lovers (finding mates for pet, selling & buying pets) in the Tamil Nadu region. I'm not sure whether such sites exist or not, but this is more of a hobby for me now. To be honest, keeping birds in cage breaks my heart. I like dogs as pets. I had couple of them before.