nirav May 10th, 2006
I listed down some ideas for my session at BarCamp this weekend. Thought I should also check up the wiki page to see what’s up.
Checked up the BarCamp Mumbai page, and my jaws dropped! Man, this thing is getting hotter everyday! There are some great sessions lined up, most of the geeks I know of in Mumbai (and around), and there is even food. And I could even find some girls in the attendee’s list 
Jokes apart, this event is going to be some serious fun!
I liked the poster, the punchline is pretty mumbaiya, and these are the sessions I am very keen on from the current list:
* “The Web 2.0 Paradigm: Design Principles for Smart Companies” - Rahul Gaitonde
* Mobile Applications: A FOSS Model - Shantanu Oak
* Mobile Computing: Thinking beyond the PC - Atul Chitnis
* Creating Wealth on Blogging+Business Networks - Ajay Sanghani
* ASP.NET seems to cripple traditional web programmers II - Vikas Yadav
* TracBac - Design Collaboration Demo - Narain, 360 Degrees
* Semantics BluesMoon
* Open Source Eye Candy Shreyas(shres)
* A Group is its Own Worst Enemy: Dynamics of Virtual Communities - Srinivas Chemboli
* Video on the Web (Flash), Manish Jethani
See you there!
nirav May 9th, 2006
Business 2.0 magazine has a piece on 5 valley startups that will change the world. From $300 student laptops to prefab homes, to playing games with your thoughts! These ideas are really cool, and have the potential to make a huge impact. Check them out!
Business 2.0 - Five startups out to change the world
nirav May 8th, 2006
It’s become so darn difficult to find good programmers (or managers) these days! Watching some TV show the other day and it said IT companies are going to have 45% shortfall on their recruitment needs this year!
We are already facing it! We’ve been running our current recruitment drive for last two months, and have nowhere touched the numbers we wanted to. I remember we used to have the office full with candidates taking the tests / interviews on weekends. Now many don’t even turn up after confirmation.
I thought this may be happening with us, checked up with a few friends and its the same story all over.
The big guys hire straight from the engineering colleges (and they are going beyond the top 125 colleges too now), so the small and medium timers don’t have anything left. It actually means they don’t have much left not only in terms of freshers, but also experienced guys.
Training is the only answer people say. Hire any reasonably guy and train him/her to your levels.
Are we software companies or training institutes?
nirav May 4th, 2006
I am facing a peculiar problem. Looks like it is a pdf2swf issue, I am pretty much frustrated with it. Posting it here to see if somebody can solve it!
I have pdf2swf installed on a Linux server. A user would upload a PDF file, pdf2swf converts that to swf and then we show it in a Flash app. We also show JPGs in the app - uploaded in a similar manner.
Now, the PDF is being converted to SWF successfully. If I load up the SWF in the browser, it shows up fine. But it does not show up in the Flash app.
We are using the Loader component in Flash 8. It does emit all the events of load progress, and also shows the event when the file has been completely loaded. Despite it being loaded completely, the swf does NOT show up in the loader.
I checked up for stupid mistakes I could make. Position of the content in loader, transparency, correct filenames, permission check - but everything seems to be in order. The same loader can easily load JPGs and other SWFs - the ones which are not created by pdf2swf.
I tried various options with pdf2swf command line - but none solved the problem.
I am stuck with this and would really like some help!
Can anybody throw some light on this?
nirav May 4th, 2006
http://www.24ways.org/
A super collection of 24 articles that show cool things about AJAX. JavaScript and CSS tricks, add-ons to your website and more. A great resource to learn more about AJAX.
Thanks Kartik!