My review of Saravanaa Bhavan in Paris

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Gangadhar

Saravanaa Bhavan is the chain of vegetarian restaurants that originated in Chennai, India and now in many countries around the world like USA, UK, France etc. This is one of the only handful 100% vegetarian restaurants in Paris.

Being a vegetarian and also one who loves South Indian food, I frequent this restaurant a lot. After going there so many times, I felt that I should write a quick post which can help others.

The restaurant is located near the Gare Du Nord area of Paris, which is also known as little India, little Sri Lanka etc. Here is a tip – if you are going to this restaurant on a cold winter day, the best exit from the railway station is the exit going towards “Rue Du Faubourgh Saint Denis” from the Magenta RER station. Even though Gare Du Nord is the main station, you are better off making the indoor walk to Magenta and exiting out from the Faubourg Saint Denis exit.

The restaurant specializes in South Indian cooking. If you know about Indian cuisine, there are many varieties and among the different varieties of South Indian cuisine, the restaurant keeps true to its Tamil Nadu (state in south India) roots. So the best bet to try at this restaurant are items like Idly, Dosa, Upma that are local to South India. The good news is that there is an overwhelming variety of Idlies and Dosas that can keep one occupied for a long time! They also make North Indian items like Chapathi, various North Indian curries etc. As any good Indian restaurant should, they also serve Chinese items like Gobi-65, Vegetable Spring roll, Chilli Paneer etc. I am sure my friends from China will recognize these items (not!). These items are better avoided even though they take up half the menu.

The many varieties of Idly and Dosa has its downsides too. They come with the same sauces, chutneys and sambars. So even though you might be expecting three different things by ordering three different idlies, they all turn out to be almost the same since you will get the same sauces and chutneys to go with them. My suggestion would be to try one idly, one vada and one dosa. If you feel adventurous, you should add something from the North Indian and Chinese menu.

Regarding the beverages to have, the standard mango lassi is too sweet and is best avoided. The fresh juices are really good. If you want to have it the way it is made in Indian roadside juice stands, ask them to add some sugar to it.

The best dessert here is the Falooda. If you can get the sweet pongal, it will be awesome but it is made only on special days. The other desserts like Rava Kesari, Gulab Jamun are available at all Indian restaurants in Paris and should be similarly avoided.

A note about the timing of the restaurant. They are open until 11 pm everyday. The best days to visit are Friday nights and Saturdays. They make special items on these days (rava idlies!). Even though the restaurant tends to be crowded on these days (see the line in the attached picture), the service is really fast. Avoid going there on Sundays (and Sunday evenings especially) since the food seems to be almost spoilt!

If you are interested in the interesting story of the founder of Saravanaa Bhavan, who is now in a jail in India, check out this news.

Why DuckDuckGo is my new search engine

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Gangadhar

This is not old news. Google has been concerned about Facebook’s rise and has been wanting to come up with a social product of its own. So they create Google+ and we all joined enthusiastically. They have impressive growth in numbers and I also supported G+ until I remembered what happened more than 15 years ago.

So Microsoft did not get internet back in the 1990s while Netscape was dominating the browser market. Then Microsoft decides to use its dominance in the desktop space to thrust IE on its users. Not many liked this move but here we are in the future knowing that Microsoft killed Netscape.

I realized that our support for G+ is similar to supporting IE when Microsoft is trying to kill Netscape through unfair means instead of building a good product. As soon as Netscape was dead, Microsoft IE also stopped its innovation until Firefox came along. Do we want the same thing by supporting G+?

I also realized that many like me were interested in supporting a competitor to Facebook thanks to Facebook’s heavy handed dealing with our privacy on the site. So it was Facebook that was making us support its competition.

Now Google comes up with “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW) which apparently is great for us. I have been worried with all the junk that shows up in our search results on Google. Now Google wants to pollute the search with G+ results? No thanks.

Google learns from Facebook and decides that it knows what is best for us. I liked how Sarah Lacy talked about it here. So Google is now emulating Facebook too?

From now on, it is going to be DuckDuckGo.com as the search engine for me. I hope they continue with their privacy first philosophy.

What I saw at Quantified Self Europe 2011 part 1

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Gangadhar

I was at the Quantified Self Europe conference this past weekend at Amsterdam. Quantified self is a community of hackers who track and monitor their activities to improve (mostly) their health. I came to know of them when I attended the Healthcamp in Bay area in October 2009. Since then, the movement has spread to all parts of the world with the help of Alexandra Carmichael and Gary Wolf.

The conference was held in an unconference format which means that the attendees chose to present their work and the conference is organized around these presentations. There were many parallel sessions and it was very hard to choose one session over another. So depending on which sessions were chosen, the experience of the participant would vary. There were many who did not present but talked about their work when we spoke during the breaks. I have included them also in here.

Theme #1: Quantified Self is preventive health (in other forums, this would be called participatory medicine since the patient takes charge of their own health). There were many variations of this theme. John Amschler (@jxa) conducted a session on hacking the Zeo clock, fitbit device to understand your health better. He is trying to get the data off these devices, put them together and then understand what his “health baseline” is. He feels that we should be able to understand our health baseline by tracking them often. After we know our baseline, we can then measure your baseline once a year and take action if you are trending away from your baseline. I felt that this is an awesome idea. In factories, we create trend charts for quality of products produced which gives us an understanding of the health of the production process. Why not use the same theory to understand our health better?

Sara Riggare presented how she controls her Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. She has been able to manage the disease due to her keen interest in controlling it. She uses a smartphone app (tonic) to keep track of her meds and understand how they affect her. She uses a Nintendo Wii for adjusting and fine tuning her balance. She is now doing a phd starting in summer 2012 to do research on Parkinson’s! She is a true inspiration. She is moving from being a patient to someone who is actively trying to find a cure! You can read an interview with her here.

Robin Barooah presented his learning from his effort to lose weight. He had gained about 45 lbs after his move to the USA. He designed an interesting process to lose weight. He just tracked his mood 2-3 hours after lunch. He did not even go back and analyze what made him happy and what did not. Just by tracking his mood, he was able to lose about 45 lbs in 18 months. Just by looking at how he felt after lunch, his brain was able to get a feel for what is healthy and what is not. His conclusion was that our body and brain is wired to do the right thing for being healthy.

The same theme was echoed in another talk about how the presenter lost weight by following a paleo diet. He felt that the act of tracking was making the difference and that it was not the data and the fancy graphs that made the difference.

I also met Martin Suba who was able to reverse his type 2 diabetes by using a combination of exercise (tracked with fitibit), diet control and weight control (tracked with Withings). He is in the process of writing up his experience. I look forward to sharing it.

There were so many other themes and many more talks. I hope to write about them and share them here.

Some hidden good and bad iOS5 features

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Gangadhar

Now that I have spent sometime with iOS5, I am finding that there are many hidden features (including apps) and some annoying changes too.

The first of the annoyances have to do with the Twitter integration with iOS. When you read about the integration, it sounds like a good thing (it probably is). But if you are someone who has multiple twitter ids to manage, the management of multiple ids has been taken out of the twitter app into the main settings app. I do not understand why something should be made harder when it was easy to begin with.

Another annoyance is how one has to get rid of notifications. So iOS has copied the Android notification feature. You swipe down on any screen to bring up the notifications and weather screen. So far so good. If you have apps like NYTimes installed, you will find breaking news alerts included in the notifications (breaking news from two days ago? It stays until dismissed or more breaking news comes up on top). You see an “x” on the top which indicates that you can dismiss these set of alerts by tapping on it. NO! Tapping the “x” brings up “Clear”. You need to tap clear to clear the notifications. I wonder why we need a two step process when one step will do. (This was probably done to prevent accidental dismissal of alerts, but it still is an annoyance). Similarly, the “Mark as unread” in email has become a two tap process.

Now that we got rid of the annoyances out of the way, we can talk about some cool features. One of them is the location based reminder feature embedded in a new app called “Reminders”. You will get this app preloaded when you install iOS 5. You can schedule a reminder to remind when you reach a particular location or when you are leaving a location. The only catch is that you have to choose the existing addresses in your addressbook. You cannot add a new address into the reminder (bummer!). But it does pick up the current address. So you can setup a reminder for when you leave or arrive back at the current location (on the same day or a different day).

The reminder can also remind you if you want to be reminded on a particular day/time. Somehow this is not linked to the calendar.

The other new feature is the option for indenting your email. To get this feature, double tap in your email editor as you would to enable copy, paste functions. The copy, paste functions come up with an arrow pointing right. Tap this button and you will access the “Quote level” option to choose what quote level you want your email text to be.

iOS 5 upgrade issues and a cool feature

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Gangadhar

Apple released the long awaited iOS 5 update yesterday. I wanted to upgrade the iOS version on my iPad and iPhone since I wanted to take iMessage for a spin with my friends all over the world. I started the upgrade process last night and it finally ended this afternoon. I am writing this blogpost to share what I learnt. I hope this will smoothen the upgrade for you! (In this post, when I refer to iTunes, I mean the iTunes on your computer).

Make sure that you are ready to give this process at least 3-4 hours (apart from the iOS download time). Since I tried to download iOS on the first day, I encountered multiple problems in downloading and connecting to the upgrade server. Hopefully these errors are now resolved.

I am going to skip the obvious steps like connecting the iDevice to iTunes, then choosing to upgrade the iOS version on the device.

Before you upgrade the OS, ensure that you take a backup into iTunes. The backup should take place if you do a complete sync of your device with iTunes. This is important since the iOS 5 upgrade process is not the smoothest.

After the download is complete, you will notice that iTunes restarts your iDevice a couple of times. I did not count mine since I left iTunes to its devices. Let it complete the process. IMPORTANT: Before you unplug your device from the computer, ensure that the restore process is complete on iTunes. This is a change from the normal process where the device displays a sign that it is syncing with iTunes. Here the device will act like normal but iTunes will still be restoring from backup. If iTunes shows that it is restoring from backup, let it complete.

In my case, since I disconnected the iPhone from iTunes while the restore was still on, many of the apps were in some sort of a limbo state. The App store on the iPhone showed that I had 40 apps to update. When I tried to update them, all of them hung with a waiting sign. The app store went back to proclaiming that all my apps were updated!

I took a picture of the screen at this point so that I could figure out what was going on. I lost that picture later (you will see why).

I had to go to iTunes, update all my apps there and then connect the iPhone to iTunes to sync up all the apps. It claimed that it updated the apps but the apps were still in “Waiting” mode.

I also noticed another change. The apps were scattered all over my iPhone instead of their normal folders. This coupled with the apps in “Waiting” mode made me realize that the I might have to restore my iPhone from its backup.

So I went ahead and restored my iPhone from its latest backup and then all the above problems went away. This time, iTunes did complain that the previous restore process was interrupted. This also meant that the picture that I had taken of all my apps in waiting” mode was now gone.

I had to set up iCloud and the iPhone a couple of times. But it is now lesson learnt! When I upgraded my iPad, I did not mess with it when iTunes was restoring from backup. The backup restore process alone took about an hour.

When I used the iPad with iOS 5, I noticed a cool new feature where you can undock the keyboard and split it into two. You press and hold the hide keyboard button on the keyboard and it brings up two new options “Undock” and “Split”. Using these options, you can make the keyboard hover over your text and split it where you need extra space. Once you split or undock the keyboard, it stays that way in other apps too.

If you have uncovered any such undocumented features, please include it in the comments. I will update the post if I find any other tips or features.