My name is Hari and I come from Kerala, a southern state of India. Specifically, I am born and brought up in a small village by the name of Koovappady, which is near to the city of Kochi(or Cochin as it was formerly known), the commercial capital of Kerala.

I moved to Taiwan in June 09, officially to learn Mandarin unofficially because I’m in a serious relationship with a Taiwanese girl. Prior to that I was Singapore where I spent almost 18 years, from 1991 September 21st till 2009 May 29th. Looking back it’s hard to believe that I stayed as long as I did in Singapore. Having worked in Singapore from 1992 till 1999, finally working as Software Engineer in Creative Technology, I co-founded Junglebyte in circa 2000, a software product company that develops and markets Teach, a computer room management software intended at schools and training centers.

I’m a software developer by profession, specializing in developing Windows applications and system level components. My choice of programming language is C++. Over the course of my career I have developed device drivers using assembly language and C and GUI applications using C++ and pretty much everything in between. Platforms that I have developed software for include OS/2, Windows 9x/NT and Linux. Of late I’ve been exploring a little bit on the web software infrastructure, particularly using various open source frameworks.

This blog serves both as a personal diary as well as a means for me to explore the latest web technologies. As you can see, I host the blog on my own domain and use a very popular open source BLOG engine as the CMS. By doing so, I hope to gain a better knowledge of the behind-the-scenes workings of a website and the various issues faced while maintaining one.

For the curious, the domain name is derived from our family’s nick name, the assigning of which is a rather common practice in our village. We are Tamil immigrants who came to Kerala almost 400 years ago and have since then assimilated well into the local culture. As a community we still speak Tamil, or a pidgin of Tamil peppered with Malayalam(the official language in Kerala), and the domain name is a transliteration for the nick chinnamuthu, that my great grandfather was known by in the village. This nick eventually came to be our family identity and is used even today.

Hope you will find something useful here and feel free to contact me if you have any queries.