Pair programming as a culture : my jijutsu vs yours

At Clearsenses, I enforce pair programming as a loose practice for all the verticals that I lead. I saw this recent article about the lead programmers of the Samba project talking about how effective pair programming is for them. And of course, a whole bunch of reddit comments dissing them. The nature of the programmer [...]

Using Git on Windows without any of the Cygwin/msysgit nonsense

Git was made by Linus – of course there would’nt be a nice library which can be ported to other platforms. So the usual way of using Git on windows would be to use Cygwin/msysgit. Well there are people who want to use Git, but dont want to use the *nix way of doing things. [...]

The best Office software for Linux – Softmaker – free !!!

By far, the best Office software for Linux – SoftMaker Office 2008 – is being given away by free for a charity campaign. For those not in the know, it kicks OpenOffice’s ass. Dont walk.. run and get it!!!

Clojure needs donors

Just reposting a call for grassroot funding by the most exciting lisp-like project to come out in recent times – Clojure, especially since it is built over the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This enables businesses to leverage the gazillions of existing enteprise-scale Java libraries, and still use it in a lisp like syntax. Scala (and [...]

A cheap, reliable fileserver with features similar to commercial offerings

We needed to build a network storage system to store a few hundred gigabytes of data. Our goals were pretty basic at first : reliability and serving the data to windows clients. So started a search for several fileserver systems – we looked basically at OpenFiler and FreeNAS. Both were good enough, and had a [...]

iPhone OS 4.0: is it low-power, multitasking heaven?

Q. What is the difference between iPhone OS and Android? A. Android (or even Pre’s WebOS) is a multi-tasking operating system – which means you can check your email while Pandora’s music is playing in the background. You cannot do this with the iPhone . Q. Err.. why? A. Because Apple claims to have tested [...]

S40: How Yahoo can take over the mobile world

Very easy – the strategy is to take a huge ignored segment and hijack them with an offering to knock them off their feet. Huh? One of the interesting news released today is Nokia prepping an App Store with almost 20K apps. The problem with this story is that it is going to be restricted [...]

A clean install of Ruby 1.9.1 + Ruby-on-Rails 2.3.2 on Ubuntu 9.04

I think the best way to go about this is to build everything from source. There are a few caveats of course, but I hope to clear them up. Prerequisites: sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libreadline5-dev mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev mysql-client libssl-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev Download the sources for ruby, rubygems, mysql-ruby OPTIONAL: Add this patch to ruby for [...]

IPV6 as an election manifesto

I have been wanting to write this post for sometime – primarily to educate our upcoming political leaders on what is needed to realize their dream (real or concocted) for a highly connected India. Recently, there have been posts by people like Sudheendra Kulkarni (of the BJP – surprisingly the Congress has no opinions) about [...]

A Business case for Infosys to deploy its “bench” towards FOSS

This is an open letter to several of India’s IT offshoring companies, who are suffering the problem of too much idle manpower to utilize this lean period to contribute towards Free and Open Source Software and in the process gather free PR and Marketing, as well as expose their employees to excellent mentorship. Dear Project [...]