The industry and openSource

It's been 4 months today since I came to Bangalore. I decided to write about open source tools that we use in our office to show people how much corporates rely upon open source for their businesses.


1. Development: RSA uses Eclipse for java and gcc for C++. Eclipse is open source and is a very good IDE and we all know about gcc. along with these are numerous open source plugins.
2. Management: We use a mix of openLDAP and active directory to manage people
3. Everybody uses firefox
4. RHEL is popular :)
5. Many products have their own wiki's
6. squid
7. tomcat for web-services
8. apache for hosting

I think thatsa lot of things used! Who-ever said open source doesn't work at the enterprise level ?

That said, that the open-source stuff listed above is some of the finest ever built. These softwares come with ultra-cool documentation and optional paid support. I think enterprises look for support and reliability. They don't then care if it's open source or commercial. Thats a major reason they go for a lotta M$ stuff even though it's not much better then open-source. Plus it's only now that open source products are starting to become compatible with each other, an area where M$ is way ahead.

Top Coder

For all those wondering why a 5th year student would blog about top coder.......My office uses Java as the primary language. I had to learn Java and what better way then spending a few days on TopCoder. Here are some of the highlights of my top coder fling

I took my sweet time to solve problems and i always got scores of 190/250 , 350/500 etc. My solutions were correct but i still got average scores. I thought this had to do with my running times.....then i coded very optimised stuff. Surprisingly my scores went down even further.


Troubled, irritated and almost pissed I asked Harry(ankur jaiswal) what the problem might be. he told me I was taking too long to code the problems. WTF! TopCoder bitches didn't say anythin abt time! Next time i coded pretty quickly and the result 250/250, 499.45/500 and 1094.05/1100. Muhahhahhahahah.

I know it's stupid that I have started using TopCoder so late in life. But better late then never.
And I have also developed a liking for java. The language is pretty neat, clean and quick. Most of the people I saw on topcoder were using either cpp/java. I think we have a case for java to be taught in some ITWS course.

PS: The annual India today college rankings should be out soon. I hope IIIT has improved it's rank. If it hasn't, expect a post filled with rants about how India today and it's ranking procedure suck :P

Back to Bangalore

After a pretty uncomfortable journey on a APSRTC bus I'm back to bangalore. I can see why people want to have offices in this screwed up city. Even though there are no good roads, lots of traffic and and a pretty high cost of living it's a hill staion compared to Hyderabad. After a week of Hyd's blazing heat this feels nice.

Here is pic of my workspace it's a pretty neat place with lots of space and some major computing power.

















In totally urelated news

1. I don't who Vijay Mallya will fire next.
2. I do know that deccan chargers totally suck
3. Man-ure won the EPL fair and square but they still suck and so do chelski.
4. I tried to sell my laptop, but there were no bids. One matka did send me a mail where he offered to pay me Rs.7000 for a laptop with a HD screen that runs crysis on medium at 1280x800 at 40 fps. And we wonder why we make fun of matkas :)
For those wondering why I would want to sell such a laptop...well it's a 17inch, 4KG monster. Not interested in carrying it around anymore.