About Me

My name is Jonnalagadda Chandra Kiran and I am a technology enthusiast from Bangalore, India. Everything below is woefully out of date. I will update it some day.

I believe in the open source philosophy. I used Linux and GNOME as my primary desktop for several years, and as far as possible deploy open source technology in all my projects. I use Mac OS X currently for the excellent compromise it offers between the freedom of open source and the well-roundedness of commercial software.

Between August 2003 and January 2004, I was at Synapse in Goa, on a Wanderer scholarship. I built a media server for Synapse that serves as a repository of all the graphical work that Synapse has produced and/or procured.

Between July 2002 and June 2003, I worked with the Pandey Lab at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA and the Institute of Bioinformatics in Bangalore, India to build the Human Protein Reference Database, a comprehensive database of proteins found in the human body. HPRD was unveiled in the October 2003 issue of Genome Research. HPRD was built using Zope as the Web-front and data-store, Squishdot, ZWiki and Mailman as discussion systems, and CVS for source control. The source code is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Prior to this, I consulted Mahiti for several months on building Web sites with Zope. Mahiti works extensively with the voluntary sector in India.

Between November 1999 and October 2000, I built ZDNet India along with Ronnie Sengupta. We used Zope, MySQL and Majordomo. Ronnie later switched to using PHP and Oracle on SunOS because we didn’t understand Zope very well, MySQL didn’t scale up to the site’s data requirements, and it was easier to get developers for the PHP/Oracle platform. Here is a picture of the team in November 2000, taken just after I left.

I setup the mail system for CHIP magazine (now called Digit) in July 1999, replacing the existing Windows-based solution. The new system (using qmail) was far more robust and scalable, and didn’t cost anything. It lasted until sometime in 2003, when the hardware started to get unreliable.

As a staff writer at CHIP, I also encouraged the use of Linux as a desktop environment within the organisation and evangelized the operating system in my published writing.

Further details of my technology expertise and experience are in my résumé.

I’m fairly active on some Indian mailing lists, mostly dealing with open source and entrepreneurship. I was also active on CiX BBS in Bangalore from February 1996 to January 1999, until I moved to Bombay. I posted there with the name “J. C. Kiran”. CiX closed down shortly after due to dying user interest and a hard disk crash. If you were on CiX too, you may be interested in looking up the archives.

My Nickname

People often ask why I’m called Jace. The reason dates back to the early ’90s, when I had about seven neighbours sharing my first name. For reasons of identity, I was then nick-named “J.C.”, from my first two initials. Time corrupted the nick to remove the ‘eeee’ sound at the end, resulting in Jace. Some people still prefer to call me “J.C.”.

My Education

I don’t have much of an academic background. I did my LKG (lower kinder garten) in a remote forest village near Rajamundry in Andhra Pradesh; skipped UKG and did my 1st and 2nd at the Lady of Fatima School in Hyderabad (my native place); 3rd, 4th and 5th at the Fatima High School in Ghatkopar, Bombay; flunked in Marathi and did 5th again in Bangalore at Sri Kumaran Children’s Home, where I continued till my 10th. My performance throughout has see-sawed from top of the class in some years, to flunking every exam but the finals.

My 11th and 12th, or 1st and 2nd year of Pre-University College (PUC) as it is known in Karnataka, were at Sri Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain College between 1995 and 1997. I took up the Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Computer Science (PCMC) combination there, but flunked Chem in II PUC, passed the supplementary exam in October 1997, then stupidly withdrew my results in PCM, hoping to improve my score, and flunked Chem again. After a gap of four years, I made another attempt in April 2001 and passed. I then became a correspondence student of business management at Annamalai University, but have since abandoned the course due to career pressures.

Contacting Me

To contact me, please use the feedback form or send me mail at jace@pobox.com. If you need privacy, use my PGP keys. Here is more detailed contact information.

My Geek Code is: GCS/TW dpu(-) s+: a-- C+++$ UL++++$ P++(---) L+++(++++)>+++++ E-(+) W+++ N- o-- K w--- O M- !V PS+ PE++ Y+(++) PGP++>-- !t 5? X- R* !tv b(++)+++>++++ !DI D+(++) G++>++++ e>++++ h* r-->+++ y. Go decode it here.

You can also find me elsewhere on the Web at Advogato, LiveJournal, the Open Directory Project, SourceForge and Zope.org.

Finally, if you are using this site to form an opinion of me, please keep in mind that this is what I think of myself; you may not find me the same person over e-mail or in meatspace.

Thank you for reading my ego booster page.