Bangalore visit

I had been to Bangalore to attend the Great Indian Developer Summit 2009. But don't worry, I wasn't a “great Indian developer” before nor I have become one after attending the event. :)

Apart from the jokes it was a well organized event. We only attended the first day of the conference. This is the first time my company sent me for such a thing. This was an event any aspiring/professional developer would not want to miss.

There were two souls living in Bangalore I couldn't visit. I remember studying with them in college. But I never realized they were put up there. It seems like I was “out of touch”. My apologies to Jaba and Ravi. And Ravi, if you are reading this I think I was roaming inside your campus while attending the event. And I am sorry, it never crossed my mind that you'd probably be roaming there too! Will make it up next time if there is one...

Thanx to Anoop (Jango), (my batch mate in college), who reminded of the two souls (Sandeep & Ravi – my college batch mates) living up there. I appreciate your effort. Hope you'd have the patience to do this again, and again... I have the opposite of an elephant's memory. :)

Friends, consider blogging like this (by keeping it short), to update about yourselves. Grab the rss feed (look of the link that says Posts (Atom)) of this blog, and put it in your rss reader. It will give you updates of new post I've made out here. I'd suggest google reader to do this job. But you have to remember it exists and visit it constantly. Or you can download an application to do the same. Or if you are too lazy to blog consider twittering (check out the intro video out there). In fact you can check out my tweets here. I usually twitter using TwitterFox. I guess this is the ultimate lazy way of posting your tweets...

My obsession with cloud programming

Ever since ubuntu has come in I've been obsessed with cloud computing. But I assure you it has nothing to do with me having ubuntu. I've blogged about this obsession here.

Ubuntu-ing all again...

Hey I got an ubuntu cd (intrepid ibex v8.10). I ordered it online, and it was shipped to me free of cost. Previously I had Ubuntu 5.10. It was quite unstable. I couldn't install most apps on it, like the new version of FF, or have the browser play flash objects. Now, in this release, its all simple.

Today I've downloaded some codecs for my Totem (similar to wmplayer in windows) to play mp3 files. These things don't get shipped default. You have to download them.

Overall I feel this is better than 5.10. Plus I hear they are working on a new release 9.04. Its time to prep my debian skills again...

Recession

You know I kind of want to make this post really long, but I feel too lazy to type. So instead I'll dive right through it.

I never really understood the actual cause of this recession. I wanted to visualize the economic drama that lead to the current situation. But behold! I haven't analyzed facts on a deep scale. I asked my self whats are the two things that you'd blame for the occurrence of this recession - I thought over production & outsourcing. It turns out that you simply can't say that's it! There is oil prices, food grains, etc all coming into the picture. I did refer a couple of sites for that:

• http://useconomy.about.com/od/grossdomesticproduct/a/cause_recession.htm - Causes of economic recession
• www.pennyjobs.com/pp/public/Articles.aspx?aid=156 - Article about recession & outsourcing. (You can't scapegoat outsourcing as a root cause).

The first visualization I got however was a forwarded email I got. Its still in my inbox; those who want it can privately message me.

Yes Man (movie)

I’ve heard about this movie through a review on the Chicks on Flicks tv show aired on Sony Pix. The verdict was “Catch it”. Yeah, and, I liked those chicks too… Anyway, the movie according to me was an effort towards grasping a positive attitude. It actually informs the audience that this is one way you can achieve positivism in your life and, please I don’t really want to go to the degree to say that they do actually advocate it. You know that is actually being fanatical about a movie, when it's reason, purpose or ethos is clearly not…

Well, I really hope you watch this movie for yourself and come out with your own opinions (and comment about them here :) ). I really found the momentum, plot, screenplay, etc all practical. This could happen in real life to some person. This story is mainly Jim Carry’s character, Carl’s, story about how he transforms from a person who always said “no” to someone who said “yes”. Along with this transformation you see the hitches he gets into and how he deals with them. The conclusion I’ve derived from the movie, there is no point in living life not being open to anything. There is no point in living without discovering what’s out there for yourself. But to do that you need to first adopt a positive attitude to everything. Say “yes” to everything for a start, and you’ll learn the rest.

But watch the movie first. ;)

Purposefully mysterious comments

This post may kill your blogging enthusiasm, but it is not really meant to. Ever wondered why strange and mysterious people comment on your blog? If they ever do it?

clark said...

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.


Joannah

http://2gbmemory.net

This is a sample of a mysterious comment I got in my last blog. (Note I've removed the links and stuff, and I've removed the comment temporarily from the last post too!). There are similar comments by people in some of my blogs. I never really paid attention to what those comments were doing there. They usually have a link to a website you've probably never heard of.

I've recently been to Technorati.com. To tell you the truth, I was trying to make my blog more visible. Technorati is a sort of a blog search engine. If you have a blog you can claim it. The site actively lists all popular blogs. So how does your blog become popular? They have a ranking algorithm. Their spiders go about indexing the occurances of links within blogs they search. Your blog becomes popular when more number of (other) blogs link to your blog; it is not the number of links within that, rather, it is the number of blogs that link to your blog. The website measures this by an index/scale they call Technorati Authority. The more the number of blogs link to your blog, the more your authority. Hence your blog would probably get listed on their web pages too, i.e. if it had a high authority.

So what's my authority? Nah, I don't want to talk about it. :)

Ever heard of PageRank? Google uses an algorithm by this name to rank web pages on the World Wide Web. PageRank is licensed to the Stanford University. Ever since this patent got licensed, people have been actively spamming websites linking them to their web pages. The effect of this, well, you can probably write an essay on it now.

But you know what I should have actually done...? I should have gone to the other person's blog and commented the following:

Hey,

Thanx for your comments on my post [link to that blog]. Y don't u comment on my other blogs too. They are

1. [link 1]

2. [link 2]

3. [link 3]

Have a nice day!

I don't know, perhaps I may even do it! ;)