Making a dent in the universe!

For all those who havent heard about the recent hike in internet radio’s royalty hike. Read this.

p.s: RIAA is the worst four letter word!

If i dont remember date, time or year, then you can be rest assured that i am either drunk or foss.in is around the corner. And this time around foss.in is actually around the corner. I would tell you the exact dates if i remembered them, but apparently you can use the magical world of internet to be aware of them, go here!

Are you there yet?

T3: Your post got me thinking. I mean for starters that book shelf describes mine and practically the book shelves of most of my friends.

A nibble here, a nibble there and not a mouthful anywhere. What is needed is focus and perseverance – not two days’ worth of everything. This is a classic, and i find it like most classics basically good to hear and say. Let me explain, its a common misconception that everything you know should aid towards a better life in some way. If you read 10 books then there needs to be a certain outcome or expertise, if you watch 10 movies there needs to be some awakening, why ?

Why cant things be done for the joy of doing them, why are they connected to the long unwinding road. I constantly make it a point to
do things which seem interesting, this does not necessarily mean i am telling you “I live for the moment” or whatever, what i am trying to say is the concept of estimation of usefullness is by itself flawed. And there is enough time in ones life for stuff to aggregate, 2 books a year for over 25 years is a good 50 books and enough “knowledge” (*cough, dont even get me started on whether books help us gain them) to actually gain perspective.

Why limit the great joy of discovery by something as trivial as usefullness in the large context? Because that view of usefullness is bound to change too…Eg:”I think there is a world market for about five computers” — Remark attributed to Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board of International Business Machines), 1943.

I discovered a long time ago, that matching everything against the eternal scale of usefulness errr… is well not useful(fun).

Do whats fun, I hope one of those fun things will help in the future but if they dont, Hey! Shit happens!

I know you probably already know, but if you are still in the dark, CFP for foss.in/2006 is out and the speaker registration now works too. Go ahead and register your rockin talk!

See you there 🙂

So the last few months have been quite educative and has almost made me a better person, Well i say almost cos i dont really believe in progress cause meanings constantly change which eventually means the two steps we took forward sometime ago might actually turn out to be two steps backward in the present context. Erm…Ok, enough of useless rant. Lets me get on with the idea.

My recent experiences have conclusively proved that there is a market out there for people who are experts in FOSS software (doh, like thats not known) but anyway, the problem is the market is uncertain and one cannot survive easily as a freelancer. Lets for once forget all the companies hiring foss developers (see how i did not use hacker), this is not about that. This is for individuals who work on foss related stuff or non foss stuff for a living and contribute on someother project in their spare time.

Ummm… so you say? My point is, if someone in this world is willing to pay for their work then why not use it?

Erm… they have day jobs, they cant work for money. Fair enough, so lets look at it some other way, Lets start an organization of foss developers who work on projects but dont get paid money!!!

Woah, you numb skull they dont want cattle, you say ?

Well no, I mean why not use that money to travel to conferences, i mean i didnt go to guadec this time cos i did not have enough money and having been in Novell for most part of last year, i did not feel good enough about asking for funds from gnome.

So here is the idea (phew)

A group of developers who work in their spare time on foss projects which customers want and the money which we get in return goes to a travel fund. The travel fund is then used by developers to attend conferences and so, Ofcourse there is this small problem of deciding who gets to go, when etc etc etc. We can work that out, use your expertise to go to conferences.

Ofcourse if someone is open to the idea of “nobody has any problems if i make money (i am a freelancer), then i have no issues. The structure is whats important. We need a organisation with well stated expertise and we should be well known. If you cant use money then you can travel with it”

What say lazy web?

Tor released evolution on windows. Go ahead and get this brand new hotness

I did some feature work for a client and he just wrote a small article on how its been working with an independent open source developer to develop something they need. He posted the article onto lxer you can read it
here

p.s: His article is titled “The Value of Free Software”, i couldnt think of anything else for this one.

Starting today Infinity Radio goes 24/7. This is a new experiment from us to make available the best of Independant Indian Music round the clock. As of now we have a couple of shows looping but dont ever doubt the fact that we will add more shows everyday and increase the stack size to good numbers

The whole of Infinity Music team would love to hear what you guys think of all this, after all this is an effort to make Independant Indian Music reach the zenith it deserves, so tune in and please let us know what you think. We are looking for opinions, suggestions, critcisms, feature requests and so, yes we wont mind a bit of praise either :-).

Tara was being very generous when she talked about Infinity, thanks a lot for the support, really appreciate it.

If you have anything immediate to say then Mail us, we would love to hear from you. Also spread the word around and help us in putting Indian Independant Music in a pedestal it deserves.

So, in a nutshell, tune in, listen to some wonderful music, have fun and let us know what you think of it. Hope to hear from you guys soon

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Do whats fun

I was at the Bangalore Barcamp today and it was great fun.
The whole event was very well organized, kudos to Jessica, Jace, Manish, Muthu and others and irresepective of all the gibberish which has been happenning on the mailing list, the event by itself was sane and fun.

I first attended a talk by Tara from Riya.com about Pinko Marketing which is basically a set of guidelines to make your venture popular using modern day paradigms like blogging and community interaction etc. There was a healthy discussion at the end of it, mostly on how its easy to get opinion but difficult to get good opinion. Anyway we walked away having thought about a little more, so that solves the purpose anyway.

Then was the talk about Tazzaa.com which is basically a news aggregation site which suits local needs. I think most people would know that anything which solves local issues is rather close to my heart. A lot of people seem to be solving issues which are niche to foreign users but hardly look at the plethora of problems which need to be solved locally. I think tazza has a head start in this feild, their site had good ajax’ified UI, very intutive and beautiful google map integration ( which seems to be a norm these days ). Also what i really liked was the nice way to co-relate world occurences with locations. For instance if you search for “Fat guy wins a million dollars”, then you would get a map which shows locations of all fat guys who have won a million, heh i know thats a slightly weird way of looking at it but it shows patterns and patterns interest me. Overall they look a good prospect and hopefully the beta should be out soon, so that i can see something working on my browser instead of the presenters. Also they seem to be working on some kind of news genome project which is vaguely like Music Genome Project which understands what i need and gives me other news which would suit my taste. They also plan to push out api’s which mean you can show the latest news on your site instantaneously, the direction they are moving in seems to be pretty good. One thing i would like them to do is to have a easy way of users publishing news onto the site as in content genrated by the readers, this could make a mash of popular content v/s very niche local content. Like for instance i would love if i read the news like “Chief Minister inspecting roads near Airport, expect a traffic jam”, if this could filter through from people at the scene on to the top of the list then that would just kick ass! Lets hope that soon i dont have to go through 10 different rss feeds to get the local news i am looking for

Here is a sneek peek if all that description made you very curious.

After this we had a group discussion about Barcamp itself which manifested mostly as an experience sharing session. We broke for lunch after that.

I am going to write about the rest of the sessions later, Just slept 2 hours yesterday, I need sleep 🙂

All good things come to and end and so has my association with Novell. I have enjoyed the last two years and greatful to all those people who have made it so much fun. I am off to chase a few dreams now, to see if i can make it on my own for sometime. My resume is here just in case think you have something interesting for me.

Kinda makes me humm “Riders of the storm” right now. Should be a learning experience this.

Yes yes, i will still work on evolution, gnome and Open Office. Why ?

Cause its fun…

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Do whats fun!