Missed an opportunity

I missed an opportunity of being Adobe Developer Evangelist. I was offered Adobe Developer Evangelist role based in India and I couldn’t take it because I am busy with my current work (Nanocast - my baby) and some other reasons (time-frame, relocation etc). Having said that, it doesn’t mean I was arrogant or didn’t like the Evangelist role. It’s my dream role, something I have been doing unofficially with passion and would want to do. Should I say I sacrificed, something I always dreamt of, because of some commitments.

BTW! If I had taken the offer, I could have become the first Indian developer evangelist, I have not heard of any other Indian company having that kind of role :)

I hope Adobe gets a candidate who is passionate for this role and accept the challenges in hand. It’s challenging in India to evangelise a product/technology because developers here have internet access but not all read blogs, not all are passionate rather work, not all contribute to forums, not all participate in many open-source projects etc etc. But challenges are fun.

Shadow

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Originally uploaded by Abdul Qabiz.
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I am just trying Flickr’s blogging feature. I am probably going to do photo-blogging..
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Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone. Have fun..
Time to look at my last years post to figure what all I have been able to do and what I couldn’t do and want to do in coming year.

I code for fun - tshirt on zazzle

I designed this tshirt on zazzle.com and also ordered one for me. Thought, you guys might be interested...
Check out my gallery on zazzle: http://www.zazzle.com/abdulqabiz

Barcamp Pune 2 - my experiences

BarCampPune2 went very well, it was very well organized by SICSR students. I wanted to be there early enough to offer some help but got stuck in traffic and lost the way to venue. I also missed Jon’s session but I could catch up some sessions on Just-SMS (yellow pages), Freeman’s session, Hussain’s session on Flash etc.

Freeman couldn’t complete his session due to shortage out of time, that did upset me a lot. In my opinion his session was the best session of the day, where we all learnt (or could have learnt more) important things about startups. It could have been really useful for SICSR students or students in general. Unfortunately, he had to wind-up while he was getting started after setting the context. Freeman has got amazing ideas about education 2.0 or startup-scenes in India. I hope, we get another chance to hear him.

Had some short discussions about YouTube, BitTorrent, Nanocast, Web 2.0, Design Patterns, Programming Practices etc with different group of folks at different time. It was fun and learning.

There was dinner, in SIMS campus, near swimming-pool and I must say, it was second time I felt so good, first was MAX 2005.

Thanks to SICSR students, speakers (Jon, Keshav et al) who flew to Pune for this event and everyone for making BarCampPune2 a good experiences and learning for everyone.

I could manage to click lots of photographs, though only few came good. See all BarCampPune2 photographs.

Technorati tags: barcamppune2, barcamp, event, india, pune

Update: Fixed typo “SICSR” instead of “SCSIR”. Thanks Hussain..

Apollo or WPF/E or Firefox

Which one would you choose for RIAs-for-Desktop or Occasionally-Connected-Clients (OCC) ?
We are familiar with Apollo, some of us know about Microsoft’s WPF/E platform which is said to be cross-platform. Mozilla Firefox rocks, specially Firefox 2.0, it provides you persistent-storage APIs among other new features.
I am just thinking why would I be using either of these? Meanwhile, if you have any thoughts please share it.
I would posting my opinion in later post.

Paradox of choice

A friend of mine passed me link of video on Google. You would learn how many decisions we make everyday and how we feel miserable even after buying the costliest jeans in a store.

It’s one-hour video so I suggest you download it and watch it in your free time.

Wanna build something like YouTube?

I just came to know of TekMedia, a product by Tekriti. Tekriti is a India based startup which was founded by some young entrepreneurs(Ashish, Gaurav and Manish).

Tekmedia seems to have following (or more) capabilities:-

• Media transcoding engine - video/audio conversion to flv/mp3 or may be other formats, metadata extraction, thumbnail-generation etc.
• Social-networking engine - sharing, rating, commenting etc.
• Syndication engine - support for blogging, MRSS/RSS feed generation etc.
• Search engine - supports video/audio searching by tag, title, id3 etc.

These are a few things I noticed by reading their product page. I have not used this product but it seems to solve lots of problems you face while building something like YouTube - a video-sharing website.

I don’t have any information for licensing or source-code-availability. I would expect to get source-code so that I can modify it, if required. Though, I would not mind sharing any changes made by me with Tekriti. I might get a good deal and save initial investment :)

Note: I am not associated with Tekriti, I just felt like writing about TekMedia.

Update: I would soon write, how to build the same using available open-source technology stack. I am not sure when but hopefully in coming months.

You are going to have a very comfortable old age

Orkut says “You are going to have a very comfortable old age”, I don’t know but I hope so :)

Orkut says nice things most of times, I am not sure of correctness but it makes me happy. May be that’s what Orkut wants to do, making users happy...

Never mind my very off-topic post :-)

YouTube - new features

YouTube has added some new features, which are:-

• Quick Capture - You can now record video using your webcam. Mike Downey has already confirmed that FMS is being used for the same.
• Mobile upload - You can create multiple profiles for different mobile-devices and you get different email-id for each profile. You can email videos from your mobile-devices to these email-ids, simple if you want to upload small video clips. I don’t have enough patience to upload large videos from mobile. But this feature indeed is cool.
• Channel customization
• You can customize the theme (color, text color etc) of your video channel pages.
• You can have custom channel URL, if it’s not taken by someone else :)
• Playlists management - You can now also create, edit and do playlist management. Seems, you can play entire playlist, I noticed each video in playlist loads in different page, I would expect it plays in same instance of player.
• Groups - Again, this is something new I noticed. You can now create group or join a group. You can have custom URL and tags associated with the groups you create.
• TestTube - You can check out this section to find out new features that are still under-development. I came to know about “Streams” which would allow users to interact with each other while watching same videos. Interaction happens through Flash based chat client.

This list is not complete, these are just my observation, I thought to list down here. Check out YouTube in it’s new avatar..