25th High School Reunion Pix

I was in India in December visiting my family and got a chance to attend my 25th high school reunion. It was a well organized event thanks to the efforts put in by Bobby, Ashish, Prashant et al. I was surprised that 21 (out of a class of 43) students attended. It was indeed great to see and talk to old friends, some of them I hadn't seen in 25 years. Unfortunately, I had to leave early since I was the prime caregiver for Leena during my visit and there wasn't any way she was going to go to bed without me.
Some of us met a little early at the school and got a chance to meet some of our teachers (they don't seem to have aged!) that are still there, walk around the school premises, and even sit down in one of the classrooms. I have to say it was very strange to sit down on the classroom benches after all these years. It did bring back a lot of memories though.

For my visit to India, I wanted a non-SLR camera that had a decent zoom, wide-angle, image quality, small size (should fit in my pocket), and a large LCD. The Panasonic Lumix ZS3 seemed to fit the bill. Most reviews on the web were very favorable for all the features that I cared about. So I went ahead and bought it. I have taken some excellent pictures with the camera both inside and outside, but with good ambient light. The pictures I took at the reunion with that camera unfortunately didn't turn out well. The pictures were taken inside with not so great light. Most of the pix got taken at a very high ISO and have an unacceptable amount of noise. As much as I would like to blame the camera, it is due to "operator error". I relied too much on the "intelligent auto" and "iPotrait" modes and should not have. Oh well, lesson learned. Here are the pix. The better news is that there was a profession photographer at the event, so it wasn't a wasted opportunity.

Podcast Interviews

A few folks have asked for links to my podcast interviews, which were done in the context of the book that I co-authored.

The main page for the SOA-related podcasts contains some very interesting podcasts from some of my friends/colleagues/co-conspirators.

It was a lot of fun talking to Kevin Davis for the interview. He had some very interesting questions on Web services in general, and interoperability, SOAP, WSDL and WS-Addressing, in particular. We talk about standards setting organizations; fundamental building blocks of Web services; Web services interoperability and the problems/challenges of getting multiple stacks to work together; WS-I and Web Service Test Forum (WSTF) and how they are helping solve the inherently tricky interop problem. I'm especially enthused about WSTF and its approach to solving the problem.

The first podcast interview is Web Service Interoperability and the Basic Building Blocks of SOA Part 1 and is about 22 minutes long.

The second podcast interview is Web Service Interoperability and the Basic Building Blocks of SOA Part 2 and is also about 22 minutes long.

And the third podcast interview is Advanced WS-Addressing and is about 17 minutes long.

Enjoy.

CFP: OSGi Community Event 2009

The Call for Papers was announced today for the 2009 OSGi Community Event. I'm on the program committee with Ian Skerrett of Eclipse Foundation as the chair. Given all the interest in OSGi, especially in the enterprise, and new work being done in the Enterprise Expert Group as well as the Spring DM Server, I'm hoping for a very good event. So start sending in papers for the event. Note that the deadline is May 15.

1234567890 and Darwin Day

Happy 1234567890 day and Darwin day!

Pix of Riya

Finally got around to posting Riya's pix.

First blog post

Never thought that I would start blogging. Mostly because I didn't think I would have the time for it, and I don't think I have anything insightful or interesting to say that anyone would want to read. Then again, overwhelming majority of the blogs don't.

I became a proud dad all over again this week, and this seems like a good way to share news, photos and videos of my family. That, and the fact that I'm severely sleep and nutrition deprived (haven't had time for either) has impaired my judgement. For all I know, maybe this blogging thing won't last long. We'll see.