Proto.in 2008 Nominations Open

Nominations for Proto 2008 are open. If you are a startup in India and would like to present at the event, head over to the website and nominate yourself. The next Proto will take place on the 18th and 19th of January 2008.

Ahmedabad Ultimate Frisbee Tournament 2007

Check out this cool YouTube video from the Ahmedabad Ultimate Frisbee Tournament 2007. Ultimate in Ahmedabad is organized by IndiCorps where they coach underprivileged youth to play Ultimate Frisbee. Check out the Ahmedabad Ultimate website for more information.

BarCamp Kerala

Mani Karthik has a post on BarCamp Kerala on Daily SEO Blog

This is exciting news! The first and foremost BarCamp is going to be held in Kerala, this November 24th. It’s probably going to be hosted at the Technopark Auditorium, Trivandrum, (actually the venue is not decided yet.)

It's pretty exciting to see BarCamps coming up all over the country. If you are in Trivandrum, think about dropping in - and then blogging about it afterwards :) The homepage for the event is here: BarCamp Kerala

Updates on Co-working space in Chennai

I had previously asked about co-working spaces in Chennai back in July. Since then, there has been some progress on this with a bunch of people opening up spaces for co-working.

Rajat, one of the guys behind Review Saurus has opened up his office for co-working. Vamsee and Bhaskar are already in the process of moving into the office with their co-workers. Rajat's office is located in Adyar.

Balaji has an office (house actually) that he would like to open up for co-working. The house has an Internet connection. For more details, you can leave him a comment on his blog.

In the comments to the previous post, Bhaskar mentions that the new STPI office is likely to have co-working space on one of the floors. In Bangalore they get cubicles, Internet, cafeteria, conference rooms and all that for Rs.5000 a month per seat, so we can expect something similar in Chennai as well.

Also in the comments to the previous post, G.Padmanabhan says that he is starting a co-working space in Nungambakkam with 6 seats. You get a cubicle, broadband Internet and access to conference rooms, printer and fax, admin services and so on. Send an email to gp [at] indelect [dot] com or call him at 94440 26983 for more details.

Kiruba is also opening up his new office space at Virugambakkam for co-working. For more details, you can get his email address and phone number via his blog.

Setting up a Pvt Ltd company in India

Kumaran has a nice writeup about the steps to be taken in setting up a private limited company in India.

Cricinfo XML feed of live scores

Did you know that Cricinfo publishes an RSS feed containing live scores of matches in progrss? I had no idea either until I came across this python script on bangpypers that uses the feed to display live scores on the desktop. Very interesting.

Chennai OpenCoffee Club Announcements

A couple of announcements. First, the November meet of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club is coming up this Sunday. The venue will be Amethyst as usual. Here are the details

4th November, 3:00 PM at Amethyst (Map)

Second, we have opened up the Chennai OpenCoffee Website so that anyone can now join. It used to be that you had to attend a meetup before you could join, but now that we've had a few meetups, we thought its time to open it up. So if you are interested in joining, head over to the website.

3:11 PM

3:11 PM : You've seen photos where you photograph the same objects at different times right? 3:11 PM does the opposite. To participate, take a photo at 3:11:00 on the 3rd of November from wherever in Chennai you are and upload it to a flickr group (the website has the details). Once all participants have uploaded their photos, you will be able to see Chennai through one instant, what everyone is doing in different places at the same time.

Microsoft gets into web analytics

Adi just passed me a link to Project Gatineau, Microsoft's answer to Google Analytics. Project Gatineau is currently in invite only beta.

Just like how Google Analytics has tight integration with Google's AdWords, Project Gatineau has tight integration with Microsoft's AdCenter. Looks like the fight for the search engine marketing space is heating up.

Looking for Django developers?

Check out Djangogigs.com. Djangogigs is a new website for matching Django developers with Django jobs. If you are looking out for some Django work, add yourself to the site.

OpenCoffee Club @ Mumbai

The OpenCoffee Club meme spreads some more. Mumbai is having its first OCC meetup on November 4th. More information here. You might want to attend if you are in Mumbai at that time.

Django Screencasts

A few people have been asking for introductory Python + Django material, so I thought I'd just link up to the two intro screencasts that I did for Django.

Learn Django: Create a Wiki in 20 minutes

This is a beginners screencast that assumes no previous knowledge of Django. We illustrate the basics of creating a web app in Django by developing a simple wiki application.

Learn Django: Extending the wiki with wikiwords and search

Following on where the first screencast left off, this screencast introduces some more django features such as template inheritance, filters and newforms library.

Obviously I've managed to fool a lot of people

I had nothing much to do yesterday so I actually started looking at the facebook apps that I had installed. One of the apps on facebook is My Personality, which basically gives you one of those personality tests (this one is the Big Five test) and then ranks you on five axes. The app rated me on what would be the equivalent of "individualistic lazy daydreaming introvert" which is a pretty accurate description of who I am.

Another feature of this app is that you can get your friends to rate you. And can you believe it, they all rated the opposite.

The two offenders are Conscientiousness and Extraversion. While my Extraversion rating was 23% (highly introverted), the friend rating was 67% (extroverted). Something wrong there? The test rating for Conscientiousness even more mismatched. My rating was 15% (i.e lazy procrastinator) while the friend rating was 96% (always gets stuff done)!!

Obviously I've managed to fool a lot of people.

Want to upgrade your Silver Catalyst trial license?

If you've been following my agile tools blog, you would have known that Silver Catalyst v1.5 was released a few days ago. You would also have known that the free version of Silver Catalyst comes with a three team member license. This is perfect for use with small teams and for evaluation purposes.

But wouldn't it be cool to use the tool on a real project with the actual team? I know a lot of people would love that.

So I'm doing an experiment. Till the end of this month, I'm giving away a free upgrade of the trial license than can be used by fifty team members. This will probably cover your entire team, so you can use it on a real, live project. It is a license with no time limits and no feature limits. The only thing is that it's still a trial license so it won't be eligible for 'official' support. Not that it matters, because you can shoot me an email anytime nevertheless.

How do you get this upgraded license?

Download the latest version of Silver Catalyst, use it and then review it on your blog with a link back to the Silver Catalyst homepage. The latest version of Silver Catalyst is 1.5.1 released today, so if you've got an older version, you might want to download the latest one. There are no conditions on the review. It can be positive, negative, whatever. Just keep it unbiased and write what you really think about Silver Catalyst.

Then email me at siddharta@silverstripesoftware.com with the URL of your blog post and I'll reply with the upgraded license.

Sounds simple? It is. I'm looking forward to reading the reviews!

Introduction to Agile: Agile Chennai 2007 Presentation

This is the intro to agile presentation from Agile Chennai 2007. It was done jointly by Bala and myself, although Bala did most of it. I just spoke for five minutes at the end of slide 83 about how agile is not a set of techniques.

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