Shreyas Srinivasan

Code Monkey for real?

A common subject of discussion at the various Indian conferences is, how vast majority of Indian Software Programmers code for a good living v/s coding for fun and how this affects the kind of innovation which comes out of India. As much as this sounds like a plausible explanation, I have over time come to believe that it is not essential to be in love with something to be good at it. What is more important is competitiveness, If you are one of those people who hates losing then you will never be bad or dispassionate at anything!

That puts a different perspective to the hallway discussions, Are most afore mentioned people “happy go lucky” people v/s dispassionate code monkeys?

The song “Code Monkey” says it all.

[youtube=”http://youtube.com/watch?v=5W_wd9Qf0IE”]

A worthwhile cause

“The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved. Desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes awwwwww.” — Jack Kerouac

From here: Matthew J. Szulik steps down as president and CEO of Redhat

There is something romantic about growth of companies, from tiny shacks to global empires. And as much as we all hate the “Empires” that some of them become, No one can ever deny loving them while they grew up.

Orkut Virus

I woke up this morning to find emails from about 10 of my friends scrapping me on Orkut. The common part of all the scraps was this text:

“2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc”

It looked like a virus and i quickly did some checks to see if i am infected too, but havent found any proof of it yet. The only common pattern seems to be that these guys are on Windows, in essence there seems to be Windows Virus spreading (luckily no traces of windows
on my machine).

If you use windows and orkut i suggest you change password immediately and also run updated virus definitions.

Here is a link which reports the problem:

http://tinyurl.com/2suxsl

[Update]
Mrinal points out that it seems to be a cross platform js and flash virus. Ad blocking this url could solve the issue.
http://files.myopera.com/virusdoorkut/files/virus.js

[Update]

One more reason why we need a semantic web

How do you notify other people of trolls without giving him link love?

My blog has decently high ranking and i need to make other people aware of this troll, but i dont want him to feel happy that a fairly high ranked blog linked back to him!

What we need is something like this
a href=”link” id=”troll”

Any best practices in such a situation?

Article about foss.in

Livemint has an article about foss.in. This is the right time to start spreading the word about foss.in and project days in Colleges.

The best way according to me is to do a distributed road show where anyone can print posters and presentations and showcase them at colleges near them, More news on this soon.

Stay tuned!

Foss.in/2007 cfp closes on the 20th

Put in your proposals asap as it gives us enough time to comment on them if needed before the closing date.

We are still looking for Indian contributors to OpenOffice.org and the Mozilla Project days. So if you are an Indian
contributor to these projects, then get off your backside and put in a talk!

Ironically i am sick today too!

Paradox of choice

Is less more?

Guadec 2007

Looks like i got my visa, so looks like i will be attending Guadec this year!

Yay!

Gnome Desktop!