ಕ್ಷಣಪ್ರಭಾ - Kshanaprabhaa

The second Bangalore Apache Solr Lucene Meetup yesterday saw an energetic attendance of Lucene and Solr developers and practitioners alike - people with varying levels of expertise. The community has grown rapidly over the last couple of months with over 180 members now, and both the meetups have been well attended. The second one happened at the Koramangala office premises of Flipkart, and it was great for them to host the meet as well as arrange for the morning refreshments. Solr committer and LucidWorks engineer Shalin Shekhar Mangar started off with the first session of the day. After a show of hands by attendees revealed quite a few newbies to Solr and Lucene, Shalin gave a brief introduction and basic demonstration of Solr 4.4, which got released about a week back. My session on "Knowledge Search at Infosys" was next, where I highlighted the use of Nutch and Solr for the Enterprise Search within Infosys. My talk included the usage and customization of Nutch to...

Six years ago, in 2007, when she reached her first grand slam final at the very same grass heaven, people were wondering how Marion Bartoli even made it all the way through to the finals. She did not look like the fittest person around given the normal standards, she did not move that great in the court, she had a strange stance while serving and played both her forehand and backhand shots with both hands most of the times. Comments ranged from "bizarre" to "outrageous" to "crazy". She faced Venus Williams in top form in the final, let the occasion get to her, and capitulated in straight sets. People went back saying she robbed them off a great Wimbledon final by virtue of having reached it. Anyone else on the planet, it seems, would have made a match of it. Many even went onto predict that she would not last long in the game, lamenting the depths to which the women's game had sunk since the glory days of Steffi Graf and Martina Hingis. Not many wa...

Going all classical Carnatic for this edition of Charukeshi, here are some of the recent best I could unearth: 1. Some Mandolin-Tabla magic by U Srinivas and Zakir Hussain in Raga Charukeshi - Adamodi Galada - a composition of Saint Tyagaraja: 2. A trio of Kripaya Palaya Shoure - a composition of Maharaja Swathi Thirunal - Kudamaloor Janaradanan on mesmerizing flute, Legendary M. S. Subbulakshmi and then Prof. Panamattam Madhusuthanan : 3. Nityashree Mahadevan singing the rare Purandara Dasa composition - "Samanyavalla" : 1. Dr. G. Bhuvaneswari singing "Bala Parameshwari" : Related Posts: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Sri Padmanabha Dasa Vanchipala Sri Rama Varma , better known as Swathi Thirunal Kulasekhara Perumal Maharaja , and even more popular as just Swathi Thirunal , was not only a well respected and widely known King of the State of Travancore , but continues to be an eternal Prince of Indian classical music. A man with mastery over multiple languages, he patronized both Carnatic and Hindustani forms of Indian classical music, composed many a kritis , sang them himself, and rewarded singers and dancers of repute from across the country during his reign. It is the versatile king's bicentennial birth anniversary this year and what better occasion to finally get hold of his biopic, "Swathi Thirunal", a 1987 Malayalam movie that I was hunting for over five years. With Kannada maestro Anant Nag playing the lead role of Swathi Thirunal, there was much to expect from the movie, and I had only seen glimpses of it online. Excellent music with legends Dr. M. Balamurali Krishna ...