Just returning from the first-day-first-show screening of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. Great movie. Don’t miss it, especially if you know a bit about Star Wars

Now, I have to get back to work…

P.S: Don’t trust the Jedis

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Popular Video Searches on Yahoo! :

This is what you’ll see at video.search.yahoo.com.

It uses Buzz.yahoo.com⁺ underneath and generates random picks from the top video searches for you. You can refresh the page to see different terms everytime.

⁺ Disclosure: I’m the engineer for Buzz and I worked behind-the-scenes for this new feature

The new Yahoo! Messenger 7 beta allows you to make PC-to-PC calls, just click on ‘Call’ and talk (to your online buddy who can be anywhere in the world) as if you are talking on a real phone, without the expense.

But VoIP is illegal in India, so we have an Indian version without that feature.

Damn.

I was reading Eugene’s explanation about “small c” and “big C” creativity as used by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

To some degree, we all are creative in the small-c way, doing things that enrich our own lives but do not receive recognition from the outside world. Big-c creativity is different — it produces ideas that “push our species ahead”.

Big-C creativity is rare. Defining it is impossible, because every definition seems to over- or underconstrain something essential to creativity from our own experience. But Csikszentmihalyi asserted that society values Creativity for its ability to transform people and cultures, and that it drives creative people to “pursue to completion” the creative act.

He goes on to mention ten characteristics of personalities of creative individuals (some surprising points) and finally ends with a question that I ponder often : “If the world is changed by a rather small number of contributors, where does that leave the rest of us?”

This is one of those questions that we could probably never answer, but I still wonder what role each individual plays in this world. When we think “individuals”, we think of people who have changed other people and the world in a profound way (whether positive or negative) such as Mahatma Gandhi or Hitler, but what about those we never hear of? What is their “role”? To consume? Or to just be?

Coming back to creativity, why is it so difficult to define it? What makes one person more “creative” than the other?

My view is that it comes down to “thinking differently” and “making things happen”. It is this combination that is potent. Leave out one of these factors, and that potent is lost.

The Unofficial Yahoo Weblog has a neat post on the Yahoo! Music Engine. Apparently, it even provides a Unix-style shell to access your music!

Did you know that the Yahoo! Music Engine (affectionately called YME) supports RSS playlists?

Excerpt:

This is extraordinary from Yahoo!’s viewpoint. To whatever extent things like this catch on, people will be strongly guided to the Yahoo! Music Engine to hear the music, and to Music Unlimited subscription to create their own playlist blogs.

I’ve had a few conversations today with friends from other teams. Believe me when I say, you ain’t seen nothing yet

This is a sort of a deja vu thought but I’m going to write it anyway.

There seems to be quite a hunt for Python guys in India, especially Bangalore. Jace’s client Partecs is looking for people who want to work on Python, Zope, Plone, Javascript, XHTML, CSS, Ajax, Usability, Open Source, Affero GPL, Subversion, Blogs, Wikis, vCalendar, i18n, and l10n (yep, quite a mouthful).

Last I heard, even Pradeep was looking for people interested in Zope/Plone to join his team at Mindscape Computing.

And you really shouldn’t miss looking at the Ubuntu Community bounties – you could get paid for working on Python scripting interfaces for OpenOffice, Blender, AbiWord, Gnumeric, and GIMP. Of course, it doesn’t matter where you live if you want to work on these bounties

Damn, I wish these kind of things had happened when I was a student….

Not totally unrelated, I’d like to stress that Yahoo! Bangalore is looking for good people with MySQL knowledge.

Open Source pays. Truly.

Update on June 27, 2009 : 4 years after writing this entry, I still get questions regarding Python Jobs in India. I think the best places to start looking for them are pythonjobs.blogspot.com, Bixee Python Job list and Official Python website’s Job Listings.

Update on July 21, 2011 : Also taaza.com.

I’ll soon be getting an autographed copy of ‘Armies of Hanuman’ from Ashok Banker! Woohoo!

That book isn’t in available in India yet

P.S. I’ll write about the other 81 reasons later…

This is the first time ever that I’m seeing such a mailer daemon error:

Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailer-daemon@gmail.com> to me

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    fink-beginners @ lists.sourceforge.net

Technical details of permanent failure:
TEMP_FAILURE: Too many connections to lists.sourceforge.net

Anybody else is facing this problem?

Some of my friends, who are uninitiated to the blogosphere, know that I write a ‘blog’ but they still don’t get what it really means.

I’ve achieved some success by helping them understand how to use Firefox Live Bookmarks but I am sure there must be a lot of intro articles on blogs. I just can’t find any that are simple enough.

About a year ago, I had presented my 8th semester presentation on Xen, now called C Omega. It is a language that combines SQL, XML and OOP into one tight language. The paper that proposed this language was named Programming with Circles, Triangles and Rectangles. The circle represents the encapsulation behavior of objects and OOP, the triangle represents the tree structure of the XML and the rectangle represents the tabular structure of databases.

I recently came across Anders Hejlsberg’s interview on Channel 9 regarding programming data in C# 3.0 and it looks like C-Omega is going to be ‘merged’ into 3.0. Its amazing that MS has taken this concept (which seemed totally radical to me when I first read about it) to production quality and is actually going to make this a core part of their platform.

Let us consider an example of using C-Omega. Suppose you want to handle books in a program used to manage libraries. Then you could write a book class using C-Omega as

[code] public class book { sequence {

string title;
choice {
  sequence{ editor editor; }+;
  sequence{ author author; }+;
}
string publisher;
int price;

} attribute int year; } [/code]

The cool part is that the above same class can be used to store the data either as XML or in a relational database. You can also instantiate an object using XML syntax:

[code] book b =

<first>Swaroop</first><last>C H</last>

www.byteofpython.info 250 ; [/code]

Note that this syntax is still static typing. Needless to say, the C-Omega compiler must be one heck of a monster.

The Python connection is that the C-Omega-ish method of access will probably be included into IronPython at some stage. Even if that doesn’t happen, we already have Pythonic ways of doing XML as pointed out long ago by wspace.

If you have ever written a program that uses databases, I highly recommend reading the Circles, Triangles and Rectangles paper. It just might change the way you think about databases and SQL, or even XML for that matter.

You can also download that old presentation of mine on Xen.