Swaroop C H is 27 years of age. He graduated in B.E. (Computer Science) from PESIT, Bangalore, India. He has previously worked at Yahoo! and Adobe.
Email: swaroop (at) swaroopch.com
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Preparations for this year’s FLOSS meet in Bangalore is well under way. The working title is still LB2005 (Linux/Bangalore 2005) but the name will be changed to something more suitable. As Chitnis mentions, the idea is to promote FLOSS in general, including FLOSS on Windows and proprietary software on Linux.
If you want to find out what’s happening or want to voice your opinion on how things should happen, please join the mailing list.
The open source community is rejoicing ever since Europe rejected software patents … which leads me to the question, what’s the situation in India?
I came across the following pages:
So, India does not have software patents (as of now), but is under pressure from WTO and other organizations.
Well, as long as we have sensible people like Manmohan Singh and Abdul Kalam at the helm the Left supporting the Centre, we’re safe.
Note: Pictures, courtesy of the community at Flickr. All rights reserved by the respective owners.
The Italian translation of my book ‘A Byte of Python’ is now available online at http://www.gentoo.it/Programmazione/byteofpython.
Thanks to Enrico Morelli and Massimo Lucci for volunteering this translation 
More info about them:
Massimo Lucci and Enrico Morelli, we are working at the University of Florence (Italy) – Chemistry Department. I (Massimo) as service engineer and system administrator for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometers; Enrico as service engineer and system administrator for our CED and parallel / clustered systems. We are programming on python since about seven years, we had experience working with Linux platforms since ten years. In Italy we are responsible and administrator for www.gentoo.it web site for Gentoo/Linux distrubution and www.nmr.it (now under construction) for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance applications and Congress Organization and Managements.
That’s all! We are impressed by the smart language used on your Book and we think this is essential for approaching the Python to new users (we are thinking about hundred of students and researcher working on our labs).
On July 1st of 2004 i.e. last year, I turned from an intern to a full-time employee at Yahoo!.
Wait a minute, one whole year is already over! OMG!
Hmm.
A while ago, there was an internal discussion on why people have worked at Y! for years and years and still stick around. So, I started to think of my reasons on why I like it here…
The single biggest motivating factor for me is the smart people here. I remember reading somewhere that “Great programming is not about great pieces of code. It’s about being surrounded by smart people”. It aptly describes my experience at Y!. The amazing part is that most people I’ve met here don’t see the difference between work and fun. They just have a ball at what they do. And I always learn something interesting everyday from them.
The second reason is that there’s something exciting going on here every single day. For example, the My Web 2.0 Social Search that was announced just a few days ago, and the Maps API that was released yesterday…
There’s excitement in my work too – there are too many projects coming up at work that I have less and less time to spend on my other activities which is a bit disappointing but I guess you can’t have it all
Coming back to Buzz, for which I’ve been the sole engineer for over a year, did you know it has a related billboard at Times Square in New York City right now? 
( Note: Erik has more photos )
That’s right, Buzz is what generated that data for that billboard
Contrary to the easy-going lifestyle that you might have heard, I’ve been through many all-nighters but I’m better now and never gonna do that again 
As the Chinese saying goes “May you live in interesting times”. That’s true more now than ever before in this computing era. I’m just happy to be in one of the centres where many of these interesting events are taking place and get to be a part of it.
As my tagline (in my internal profile) goes : Live. Life. Work. Yahoo.
Avinash was very busy in the past weeks and was all excited the past couple of days. Why? Yahoo! Map API was released and he worked on it. He’s also written a neat demo for it.
The finale before the release was quite interesting… because Google also released its maps API – a difference of mere 2 hours between the announcements!
McManus has written about his take on the comparison of the two APIs and details of the announcements are in this DevSource article.
