On June 15th I completed one year at Yahoo and Bangalore.
I sat around to write about my life in the past one year and then I read about Derek’s experience.
Now, all you need to do is to replace *Sunnyvale* with *Bangalore, *Yahoo Hack Day 2008* with *Yahoo Hack Day 2009* and *Kansas City* with *Chennai* in this post and you will get my story 
Thanks to everyone at Yahoo for making this past one year as one of my best years and also for Derek for saving a couple of keystrokes for me. 
Posted in Google/Yahoo, Random/Personal Tagged Bangalore, HackDay, Yahoo 4 Comments
I got introduced to Git and Gitbub by Yuvi and ever since I have been hooked up. I have started using it for all my pet projects. I even convinced Steve Bruner so that I can use Github for RoloPress.
Over the years I have released lot of code out in the wild and I thought of consolidating all of them in Github, so that it can be of use to someone who might need them. At last I found some time and uploaded most of them to my Gitbub account.
Below is the description of some of those projects which are currently there in my Github account.
Bright Light is the WordPress theme, which is powering up my blog. I have released it out hoping that it might be useful for someone.
I created this project to share my homework and the sample code used in the “Developing Android Applications in Java” online class, which I am currently following.
These projects contain my contribution to RoloPress, a WordPress based contact manager. You can read more about WordPress from its homepage.
FeedBurner-stats is a Google Gadget which allows you to keep track of your Feedburner subscriber count. It uses Google Chart API and Google Gadget API.
Bloglines Notifier is a Google Gadget which will notify you the count of unread items in your Bloglines account. (Hope someone is still using Bloglines )
It is a fork of John Resig’s retweet script which I am using in my Easy Reweet WordPress Plugin. I have added a new feature to this script which allows you to associate the list of urls created to your bit.ly account.
It’s a small Ruby script which prints the number of words (with their count) present in a given text file
It is a small Ruby script which unrars all files found in all the subdirectories of a director given in the command line.
I am still undecided about porting my WordPress Plugins from the official WordPress Plugin repository to Github. I guess it is better to have my Plugins in the Plugin repository for now.
BTW feel free to fork any of these projects and I would be happy to pull in your changes if you have added some enhancements to them.
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged Bit.ly, git, github, Google Gadgets 1 Comment
Well, it’s the day in every year, when you have to get loads of scraps in Orkut and wall postings in Facebook, emails from forums which you have registered with a couple of years back, phone calls right from 12 in the night and your phone keeps beeping about the new SMS. Yes today is my birthday and I am turning 27 this year
Thanks guys for all the scraps, wall postings, emails, tweets, phone calls and SMSes. You all really made it my day today.
So like all these years, I am going to eagerly wait to face the surprises which life is planning to throw at my way.
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged BirthDay, wishes 5 Comments
I was doing an ego search on Google and you can imagine my surprise when I found this ad as one of the sponsored result.
I know I am famous but was humbled to know that even Facebook knows about it.
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged Facebook, Fun 2 Comments
Well, without much delay (just 18 days compared with last year’s 56 days ), here is my year end stats and review post for the year 2009.
2009 has been a year of rollercoaster for me and a year full of changes both at the personal side as well as professional side.
I started the year with a trip to the operation theatre and then to Bangalore for attending Yahoo hack day, started having a crush on Google Wave, then changed job and moved to Bangalore and then changed my host , participated in WordPress Plugin competition and then released a couple of Plugins (for which I got an excellent review from Ozh), and then had a break-up with TV (which turned out to be a very good thing) and then visited US on a business trip and then finally ended the year, by releasing RoloPress.
Okay enough of self-bragging and time for some stats.
Thanks to my break-up with TV, I got more time to spend with my blog, which can be seen from the increase in the total number of posts. The number of posts slowed down a bit towards the end of the year due to my travel and RoloPress, but on the whole, I am happy with the results
More than the number of posts, the one which gave me more satisfaction, is the number of comments. Last year, I said that I will try to engage more user activity in my blog and one look at the graph should say that I succeeded.
Thanks to all those who commented, you really bought a smile on my face.
There is a slight increase when compared with the previous years and since things have worked out well so far, I am planning to continue the same this year too.
I have almost written (okay typed ) almost double the amount of characters in 2009 when compared with 2008. This is really good and I hope to continue the same next year too.
So for this year, I am planning to concentrate more on my WordPress Plugins and RoloPress and also planning to learn a couple of languages like Haskel, Scala and R. Let’s see how things turn out
<shameless self promotion>I have created these wonderful graphs using my year end stats WordPress Plugin. If you run a WordPress blog then you can also generate these graphs by downloading my year end stats WordPress Plugin.</shameless self promotion>
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged 2009, RoloPress, stats, Year End Stats 1 Comment
Finally after 3 weeks of stay in Sunnyvale CA, I am back in India.
Whomever I met after my visit, asked me the same question. How was my experience out there? So instead of explaining to each of them separately, I am going to point this blog post to them.
I am not going to get into the cultural/lifestyle or economical aspect at all, instead I am going to just describe the subtle things which you will notice in your everyday life.
The first thing that got my attention after getting down at SFO airport is that people drive in the right side of the road. Even though I know about it before, it took me quite some time to get used to it (especially while taking turns)
The second thing which I noticed was that the metric system (km, kg, litre, Celsius etc) is not used. Instead they use the British system (miles, pounds, gallons, Fahrenheit etc). I was always trying to do the conversion internally when doing calculations.
This one was a real surprise. After landing in my hotel, I realized that the elevators don’t have ground floor. So the ground floor becomes first floor and the first floor becomes second floor. Luckily I went in the elevator the first time instead of taking the steps. Otherwise I would have reached 4th floor instead of 3rd floor.
I was not sure whether it was because of shortage of manual labour or for cost-cutting. Most of the places like shops, petrol (okay okay gas) stations, super markets etc were automated. Vending machines have replaced manual labour in all these places.
This one was really a good thing. In almost all places, there were separate accessible paths/doors for disabled people. Every parking lot had separate places for disabled people.
On the whole, experienced a lot of new things in my 3 weeks stay and have taken some tons of photos. Keep an eye on my flickr page; I will be uploading them soon after doing some post processing.
PS: Wish you all a happy and prosperous 2010.
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged travel, Yahoo 6 Comments
Well guys, got an quick update for you all.
I am leaving to Sunnyvale CA tomorrow morning for a business trip and will be back just before Christmas. Since it is a business trip, I would be busy during the weekdays and should be free only during the weekends. I haven’t made any plans for the weekends yet, but let’s see how things turn out to be.
This is my first international travel and I am pretty excited about it. Got any tips for the first time traveller?
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged travel, Yahoo 7 Comments
.. and I am really happy about it now.
Like my role models, I thought of abandoning TV as a 30 day experiment and it worked out wonders.
It all started after I moved to Bangalore. I rented a new house and I needed to buy a set-top box to watch TV. I was slightly busy getting settled in the first week and so was not able to do it immediately. After about a week of not watching TV, I thought of continuing it for a month, to see how things turn out.
Now, after a month, I am very happy that I took the decision to abandon it. I was able to save at least 3-5 hours a day and I tried to put in those hours to other things that I always wanted to do, but didn’t had time to do. Following are some of the things that I did in the hours that I saved.
I concentrated more on my blog with the extra time I got and it has yielded very good results. Here are some stats.
Next within these 30 days, I have created and released more than 5 Plugins for the WordPress Plugin competition and have updated around 3 of my old Plugins. Ohh, by the way, do vote for my Plugins
The next best thing, I did during this period is that, I have started going to the gym regularly, which I always wanted to do (but didn’t) for the last 10 years. I could feel that my stamina has increased tremendously after just one week of regular workouts.
I was also able to finish reading around 5 books, which were lying in my bookshelf without reading for quite some time.
I have also invested the extra time in a couple of other projects (which I will talk about soon). I am also working on enhancing the theme that I am using for my blog and you will see it in action with in a week.
I am planning to continue abandon TV and planning to go to theatres to watch movies. May be I will relax this rule a bit, when cricket matches take place.
Overall, I was able to achieve, what I wanted to achieve for years, by just switching off the TV for 30 days. More than achieving things, I am very happy and much relaxed now. No wonder why they say that people who don’t watch TV are very happy.
So what are you going to do for your 30 days experiment?
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged 30 Days, Bangalore, TV 14 Comments
It’s time for a confession. I have this strange addiction to buy domain names. Don’t think I am into domain squatting, but it’s the first thing I do when I think of a pet project.
But the problem is that most of the times I just stop after buying the domain Because of this I have accumulated a bunch of domain names and some project ideas associated with it in vapor.
My recent addition to the list is sudar.me, which I bought with the idea of hosting my own url shortening site. May be I will do it using yourls.org, a GPL’d URL shortener, and its WordPress plugin developed by Ozh.
Do anybody have this strange addiction?
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged Addiction, domain registration, ozh, yourls.org 8 Comments
This is what happens when a company’s Twitter account is managed by PR.
Update: Okay it seems that this Twitter account is not run by PR but by Journalists.
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged DNA, PR, Twitter 5 Comments