I was going through weather data exposed by India Water Portal and I was thinking about an interesting application which would show my love to Bangalore. The best part of Bangalore is its temperature, rains and clouds. So I wrote this small app which uses the data provided by India Water Portal (which in turn is by CRU). IWP has data for all the districts in India, for every month and for multiple parameters. They have data for 100 years. It quite an amount of data to play with if you are interested. They have an easy way of filtering and downloading.

It uses Jquery and data is JSON format. View source the page to get the code. I am not much of a visual guy. I browsed many sites to get a color pattern. Here is what I am using for different temperatures 20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30. All temperatures are monthly averages and are in degree centigrade.

It took two hours for me to code it. Go check the application and let me know what do you think.

I Love Bangalore..because

I will add rain and cloud information once I demystify that data.

I cant believe, its been three months already! Initially the idea was to write one blog post per week. But then the work did not allow me :) Now that its been three months and the projects that I am working on have stabilized to great extent, I have time to write. Here is the first installment. Better late than never or like our Rajani sir says “late but latest”.

Information about two of big projects which I am involved are *technically* out in the public. You already know something about them from the newspapers. Let me give you little more. I guess it will be of interest to developers than casual readers.

iJanaagraha
IJanaagraha, ij in short is a hybrid of social network, information and tools portal focusing on citizen, Govt and citizenship. As of now we have a simple version running on the domain. But we have been working on the reloaded version for about four months now. I am playing multiple roles in this project (like in any startup) and trying to give as much as possible. I am very exited with the functionalities we are trying to build into it. I feel its very unique kind of site. Even though we don’t have exact dates for the launch. I am expecting it to be online by middle of this year. It will have OpenSocial developer platform for application development. I am hoping it will be heaven for developers who want to build city based apps. Wait for more announcements on official blog. We have very fun loving and dedicated team as of now and we are still expanding. Let me know if you are interested in full time job/volunteering.
Image credit: bangalore mirror

WISA (aka backbone behind TOIs BangalorePatrol)
There is no way you could miss this if you read TOI-Bangalore. It was on the front page on Apr 7.
WISA – Ward Infrastructure & Services Assessment is an objective way of grading our wards. We are collecting lot of data offline in an objective way. The data goes through various sanity tests and then it gets to go online. Public will be able to see aggregated results. I am trying to get some kind of data out for developers to experiment. Its still very early to give details. I will update you as and when I have something interesting. The WISA project measures a set of urban indicators divided into 7 main categories viz.
1. Mobility
2. Water
3. Electricity
4. Public Health
5. Public Safety
6. Public Amenities
7. Environment & Ecology
For each of this there are lot of indicators (data points) which are collected. Its data analysts heaven. We are working on lot of infographics and in general playing with data. Again dates are not sure but expect in a month or two or three :) so have patience.

Other than these, I write these small apps when I get time. I must say I never realized how three months passed. Part of the credit also goes to the friends I have made here and the rest goes to my traveling from ecity to city :)

One liner: Journey has been great until now.

BJP is the clear winner of 2010 BBMP elections. I expected it as BJP is the ruling party here in Karnataka. I should have thought about presenting results in a better way. But then it struck me only in the late noon. I could only create only a small mashup of election results on Google maps.

I got only couple of hours in the evening to work on it. Even though my colleagues [Uthara, Vandana, Anamika, Asim and IJ GIS interns, Love you guys.] helped me in putting up the result in JSON format. It’s not complete yet. I will keep updating it until its complete. [I am using dropbox, so I just have to update the data on my computer and it gets updated on the site. Kewl++]. I can’t guarantee for the sanity of the data. But go ahead and use it in your own mashup. Try give the credit if possible.

Please go have a look and I think it gives all the information you need, Let me know what do you think.

- BBMP 2010 Elections results on the map
- BBMP 2010 Elections results in html, CSV ot TXT, JSON format.

Congrats and all the best to BJP. I hope they will work towards better Bangalore :)

At last the goverment has decided to conduct the elections. Its going to happen mar 28, 2010l. Local elections are very important for the city. There are many events scheduled to help citizens make an informed choice. Here are some

1. Suvarna Bengaluru Pranalike:
   On Friday, 19 March @ Town Hall, JC Road (near corporation). The event will start at 6pm and three major parties are represented. Here is the copy of the invitation
2. TweetUP: I am with the help of other friends, organizing a tweetup on saturday.
   4pm to 7pm, @Matteo cafe, church street,
   
   
3. KYC: Citizen matters with Resident association is organizing Know your Candidate event
   On saturday, JPNagar
   On Sunday , BTM
   Check the invite for details

BTW I am interested in knowing

Here is the third installment of Outfoscions about which I was talking. After the first two technology ones, I am presenting you, next very tasty one called Potluck. Yes, the venture is called potluck and its an exclusive north Indian restaurant in Bangalore, started by B K Birla. Here I present small interview I did with Birla who is CFO, Chief Food Officer at Potluck. Thanks for the time Birla.

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[thej] How and when did you get this idea of opening a restaurant?
[Birla] I have been enthusiastic cook from an early age. In typical North Indian households, cooking is a necessary skill for girls and almost a taboo for boys. But in our family I have always seen my father and brother cooking good food and leo technoloarning cooking came naturally. After I came to Bangalore in 1995 I setup my kitchen within 2 weeks and cooking everyday became a natural habit for me. In fact the deal I had with my roommate was that I will do the cooking and he will wash utensils. Besides all this I always had 10-15 friends at my place on weekends and cooking for all of them was a very regular affair for me and I enjoyed cooking for all. Similar things continued during my Infosys onsite trips and it was always fun to cook for everyone.
Opening a restaurant was always on my agenda but while working at Amazon I came across a soft skill trainer who also runs a South Indian restaurant called Krishna Cafe. It was an inspiration for me and my friends at Amazon and that is the point where we started to think seriously about this venture.
On a lighter note if you have fed free food to too many people, you want to make up at some point J

[thej]How is it different from running a software project, I had to ask this?
[Birla] There are both similarities and differences in running a software venture and restaurant. The similarity is in terms of people and their aspirations. A BTech graduate coming from IITs and aspiring to learn new skills has very similar mindset to an uneducated waiter coming with pretty much nothing from places like Darjeeling and trying to become a captain (guy who takes orders in restaurants).
One of the main differences I see is in terms of the cycle times in creating a product and getting feedback from customers about it. In food business the cycle is compressed and the feedback is pretty much in your face. The other big difference I find is that in software or other white collar jobs we get used to a very polished language and environment. In food business or probably other brick and mortar businesses you come across all types of people.
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