Apparently, Wikipedia thinks I've made a positive contribution to Slashdot subculture.

:-D

The irony, of course, is that I intended the post to be an experiment; wanted to see how much /.-tter-like I could sound (which is why I felt compelled to put in credits and references). Guess we know now.

That, and those Wikipedians sure have a lot of time on their hands. :-|

"Alas! Shireen!" at every stroke he cries;
At every stroke fresh miracles arise:
"For thee these glories and these wonders all,
For thee I triumph, or for thee I fall;
For thee my life one ceaseless toil has been,
Inspire my soul anew: Alas! Shireen!"- Nizami

The Telugu/ Kannada/ Marathi new year is here!

Ugadi subhaakaamkshalu/subhadigaLLu, and guDI paDva shubhkaamnaayee to everyone!

two days before the spring finally arrives, let us take time out and greet each other in celebration

For, as the Googlewhackers among us know already, the Merry Festival of Belgthor is already upon us.

Update: Belgthor presents from /.: mod points! Suggestions anyone?

An artifact from the past:- a ticket checker with a hypercool RFID(?)-reader checking everyone's tickets/cards to see if they have, indeed, paid the full fare amount or not. The checker comes to each one of us, asks us for our ticket/card, taps it against his reader, and then proceeds, presumably, to fine anyone who hasn't paid the correct fare.

But ah, we note with amused impunity, it isn't *buses* where we beat the fare system. :-)

Whatever it takes, never ever THINK of clicking this link.

Depending on your jurisdiction, you might be jailed, censured, tortured, or even sacrificed for the Great God of the Temple of The Tooth. In any case, forget you've ever seen this link here, coz plainly speaking, you HAVEN'T.

Goa's First Division has some very interesting matches!

... club secretary Diniz Sardinha said it was "ability" that gave his side the match.

#include<STD ISD.h>
#include<college.h>
#define MAAL beautiful_lady

main()
{
goto college;
scanf("100%",&ladies);

if(lady = = MAAL)
sugar++;
while( !reply )
{
printf("I Love U");
scanf("100%",&reply);
}

if(reply = = "GAALI")
main(); // go back and repeat the process
else if(reply = = "SANDAL ")
exit(1);
else if(reply = = "I Love U")
{
lover = MAAL;
! ! ! love = (heart*)malloc(sizeof(lover));
}
goto restaurant;

restaurant:
{
food++;
sugar++;
pay->money = lover->money;
return(college);
}

if(time = = 3.00)
goto park;

park:
{
for(time=4.00;time<=5.00;time+=0.001)
kiss = kiss+1;
}

free(lover);
return(home);
}

(Posting here more as proof-of-concept rather than its intrinsic humour value Although, I suppose, it is funny its own corny way)

(Yes, non-Indians, the infamous In-glish in action out here)

A patent war is hotting up in California.

The copyright, Reinbolt points out, prohibits others from not just copying the sequence of asanas, but also from creating 'derivative' works of the sequence, he adds.

Other sources as well.

So we're a mostly MS-only shop [*] out here with all of our current projects being developed on VisualStudio.net and coded in C#. In fact, we're one of MS' preferred partners in the region; they run to us whenever they want neat lil demos to demonstrate the power of .net to n00b Comp Sc undergraduates. In short, we're the "developers" in "Developers, developers, developers" chant that all of us so love.

Any guesses on what we now insist on using to maintain our CVS? :-) This, after two weeks of absolute chaos using the best MS solution the client could think of. :-|

(For the record, I absolutely love Eclipse, and was even working on a patch I thought would be useful for cross-team collaboration. Unfortunately, I can't quite work on that project on company time for legal reasons, and the shift key on my home laptop has been stuck for the last two weeks. More on that later)

[*] - Apparently, we'll be moving over to J2EE projects as well, now that we have my, ah, expertise, on board.

Bhasha India.

I LIKE my colleagues! :-D

Places I've accidentally gone to, instead of coming home:-
1) McDonald's
2) The food court in the local mall
3) The nearby Tropical Rainforest (tm) where I saw a snake,
4) Airport, and thence to Antarctica (or any other random place)
5) The local subway/bus depot (mostly as a result of oversleeping)
6) The local red light district
7) The neighbouring country
8) A place I'll never forget.

Ever since I moved to my new place two months back, I did all of the above. (Update: EXCEPT for the Antarctica option)

--
Incidentally, here's a BONUS poll, just for YOU. If 'x' is the time it takes for you to go to work, x can be defined as:-
a) x < = 30 min
b) 30 < x < = 60
c) 60 < x < = 90
d) 90 < x < = 120
e) x > 120
f) I haven't gone home in the last one week, you insensitive clod!
g) I telecommute; my boss is 3000 km away in Novosiberisk, Siberia
h) I do all my work on /.
i) I have outsourced my project(s) to Cowboyneal.
j) I haven't left home since the last blue moon.

Writing this as I wait for the boss to get ready and call me up. Yesterday was Bakrid out here and a public holiday, so today is the start of the week out here. We're heading to a client site today for on-site consultation and development.

Well, the short summary here is that the new job has been extremely satisfying so far. The hours are long, heck, we pulled out a night-out-er last Friday night, but the work is fine and, more importantly, the team is amazing - great bunch of guys, loads and loads of talent, and hard-working (and naturally, ambitious!) to the hilt. Learned quite a lot technically speaking in the past one week; suddenly feeling very confident of myself in coding big projects.

The other fun part is being a part of the industry here. Never realised this, but it's an entirely different environment out in the corporate world, compared to the stuff you get back in academia. Let's put it this way:- remember I was talking about the most evil position possible in the World's Most Evil Company? Yup, I found out how was getting hired to that job (not me of course, and personally, no regrets; I'm really not suited for that kind of thing) a cool five days before the guy himself knew about it! Guy is of course a friend of mine, and quite frankly, I didn't know that he didn't know (although my source knew that he didn't know I knew), but all the same, he seemed to be pissed off when I started gloating about having known that he got the job all along. Which, of course, seemed hilarious to me, at which point, he got even more furious. Oops. :-|

[PeeWeeMan and gokulpod, if you're reading this, you know this guy. Not many people from gokulpod's batch in SoC who graduated along with me (and haven't gone to Stanford. :-) ]

And oh, we're hiring. So, if you have experience in .net, particularly C#, (sound of boos from the /. crowd), and don't mind a career in the High Straits, then do let me know. :-) [Of course, doesn't need a mention that you'll have to expect, well, South East Asian salaries, although they are quite competitive under the current market conditions.]

Happy Chinese New Year, people; here's to renewed prosperity, success and good luck in this Year of the Monkey.

And oh, this is what you can expect this year.

[Obligatory plug-in: I'm a budding expert in Chinese calendrical traditions. Feel free to ask any questions here. :-) ]

Attached to a fluff on Microsoft-versus-MikeRoweSoft:-

But the high school student decided to fight back and his story got media attention to the extent that he was forced to shut down his Web site on Monday morning after getting about 250,000 hits. He managed to get the site back up after moving to a service provider with greater capacity.

Apparently the kid has been featured on lesser known news sources as well.