work culture in 'big' companies

I have not been able to post much recently. But i just had to share the following post about working culture in big companies.

http://theonda.org/articles/2009/07/03/work-and-meaning

Entrepreneurs can change the world

Nishant

On the career front, at last I have some updates since the last post. I have landed a job as an independent consultant for a small company for some months and would be working on packetcable 2.0 IMS client for cable modem device. Well, something is better than nothing and the good thing is that I am earning and do not have to think zillion times while spending on even the basic stuff. I know, I may be in a similar dilemma once my current contract period gets over and again I may end up on the road and who knows, may have to go through this experience again. My current job does not provide me all the security and benefits of a corporate job, but I am not complaining.



image by Martin Pettitt

One thing I have learnt during this period is that your friends, colleagues and your connections are really important and invaluable. I would like to thank each and everyone of them for putting in effort for me during this period in trying to get me some paying job.

Curious about the post title? Well, I thought I should be a bit melodramatic this time (Nishant means end of darkness). Enough of crap talk. Next time, I will try to make sure my posts have some interesting tech content.

On the road ...

Well, it's been a while since my last post. And a lot of things have happened since then, which have kept me busy and away from posting.


image courtesy n0r


I was let go off from my company more than a fortnight back. Since then I have been looking for a job, trying to get in touch with my friends and old colleagues to see if they have anything in their organizations that fit my skill set. And have shared my profile with some consultants as well. But so far, no luck. But I am optimistic and hopeful that I will land something soon. This no-job period also provided me an opportunity to go out of bangalore to my native for a week.

I have taken up some freelance projects during this time, which provide me an opportunity to keep coding and also keep me busy in addition to earning some money. I am planning to keep on working on such projects till I land a full-time job or some position as an independent consultant. These freelance projects keep your mind occupied and force you to keep on learning newer things, which I would have been reluctant to if I was in a full-time job.

That's all for this post... but expect more regular posts henceforth.

Gears comes to Gmail

Well, what more can I say - Gmail is now powered by Gears. Read about the announcement and details here...

Google started off with reader and now gmail.  I see them enabling all their apps with Gears and this is the next step in making all the desktop apps irrelevant.  And they have all the right tools and pieces in hand to achieve that. The tools - Gears, the client - Chrome (& firefox?), the apps - Gmail, reader, ...

Would I be afraid if I were MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL... or any other web app out there? Yes, certainly I would. And I personally would hate if Google goes ahead and dominates the web. Offline availability is so important for every web app out there. Atleast in the short run, all the web apps should try to enable offline access. Myspace saw the need for offline access to information and did the right thing by enabling their message/mail access offline.

Now I foresee many more web apps enabling offline access via Gears, or otherwise. HTML5 is still long time away before being ubiquitous. And Gears will fill in, till such a thing happens and continue to provide the new features coming in HTML5, right NOW.

MoMo Jan 2009

Mobile Monday meet/event for Jan 2009 is being held on 28 January 2009, from 6:30pm onwards at Sasken office. The registration is free but the number is limited, so rush for it.

The schedule is

1. Talk by Ashish Sinha on "Is Voice the King of VAS?"
2. Demo of VoicePHP by Yusuf Motiwala, CEO of Tringme.

I am curious and looking forward to the demo of VoicePHP.

All the details including registration can be done here...

set facebook user status

If you are familiar with facebook (or for that matter, any one of the gazillion social networking applications out there), there is a way for a user to set his status - any random string. Just like one can set a custom message on his favorite IM client.

One of my friend was exploring the facebook REST api's and was trying to set the status via the REST api. Now facebook has a peculiar feature where for certain functionality, the service adds additional security and needs additional permissions. Now, setting of the status is one such api that needs additional permission. And my friend was finding it hard to figure out how to get the permission using the REST apis. There are means to get the permission if you develop for/on the facebook platform. I too did take a look at the perl facebook api module but got fed up.

Then I googled and found this link. I used the code and ran the script. I was able to login but could not set the status nor fetch the status. So I spent some time hacking around and looking at the response from the facebook and updated the script. Now the script works, one can set the status and get the current status as well. Remember, this is not using the REST apis or the web service. I guess this is called as data scraping or spoofing? I am not sure. The code/script is not optimized but ...

Anyway, here is the perl code. The script takes the facebook login email, pass and status string as the argument...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use warnings;

use HTTP::Cookies;

use LWP::UserAgent;



my $email;

my $password;



my $user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6'; # whatever...



#print "Please enter FB email for login\n";

$email = $ARGV[0]; #read the login e-mail

#print "Please enter FB password\n";

$password= $ARGV[1]; #read the password



print "Thanks\n";



chomp($email); #remove last line

chomp($password);



my %postLoginData; #necessary post data for login

$postLoginData{'email'}=$email;

$postLoginData{'pass'}=$password;

$postLoginData{'persistent'}=1;

$postLoginData{'login'}='Login';



our $response; #holds the response the HTTP requests

#set the headers, let's make this a Firefox browser!

my @header = ('Referer'=>'http://www.facebook.com', 'User-Agent'=>$user_agent);



our $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new(file=>'fbkCookies.dat',autosave=>1, ignore_discard=>1);



our $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new; #init browser

$browser->cookie_jar($cookie_jar);



# incase you are behind a proxy

# $browser->proxy(['http', 'https'], 'http://127.0.0.1:9876/');



$browser->get('http://www.facebook.com/login.php',@header);



#here we actually login!

$response = $browser->post('https://login.facebook.com/login.php',\%postLoginData,@header);



#was login successful?

if($response->content =~ /Incorrect Email/) {

    print "Login Failed...Quitting..\n";

}

else {

    print "..and we are in!\n";

    #let's go to the homepage

    $response = $browser->get('http://www.facebook.com/home.php',@header);



    $response->content =~ /
/;

    my $profileid = $1;

    print "Profile id: ", $profileid if defined $profileid;



    $response->content =~ /id="post_form_id" name="post_form_id" value="(.+?)"/;

    my $postformid = $1;



    #Let's now post a new status

    my $newStatus = $ARGV[2];



    print "\nPOST FORM ID: $postformid\n";

    my %post_data = ("action" => "HOME_UPDATE", "home_tab_id" => "1", "post_form_id" => $postformid, "post_form_id_source" => "AsyncRequest", "profile_id" => $profileid, "status"=>$newStatus, "test_name" => "INLINE_STATUS_EDITOR");



    $response = $browser->post('http://www.facebook.com/updatestatus.php?_ecdc=false',\%post_data,@header);



    ##Ok! The status was posted...

    ##Let's now see what we have done...

    $response = $browser->get('http://www.facebook.com/home.php',@header);



    if($response->content =~ /(.+?)<\/span>/)

    {

        #Here is the new status

        print "My status: ",$1;



        if ($response->content =~ /(.+?)<\/span>/) {

            print " set around: ", $1;

        }

        else {

            print " ooops !!!\n";

        }

    }

    else

    {

        print "Could not retrieve status...";

    }

}