thock thock

Around two or three weeks ago, Sabeer Bhatia had come to our college to deliver a talk. He drew a large crowd and our seminar hall was full and people had to stand at the back.

If you hadn't known that he was an Indian, you would have thought that he was in all certainty an American. Typically American formals and a pure American accent. I found him rather pompous. He started on immediately about himself and how he loved being an entrepreneur and went on and on about it. When it was time for the questions, someone asked him what if they did not find an idea that they could start working on or a company. He said 'See, everyone might not like a job as an entrepreneur you know. They might be risk averse or they like their cushy jobs too much or they have a family to support and look after. Everyone cannot afford to be an entrepreneur, I know I can easily manage that (laughs) and I lerve being an entrepreneur, but it might not be true for everybody' (he must have repeated the last line 4 or 5 times!) .

I just attended a talk by Brian Behlendorf, director of the Apache Software Foundation. He has a ponytail :D. I remember telling Sat once that 'Its surprising these people have such a good sense of humour, you normally expect programmers to be the nerdy, no-life kinda people' and he gave me a skeptical and slightly irritated look that said why-the-hell-can't-they. I've found my self-made-myth to be broken quite a few times.

Our Enterprise Information Systems professor worked under Dijkstra and Nicholas Wirth is one of the funniest and cutest old professor's i've ever seen :D.

This guy too made some really good quips. He was talking about how Apache came about as a result of work done and discussed through only email lists . Then he talked about the name, apparently he thought Apache would be a good name, kinda romantic as the last tribe of the Indians before the colonials came, then said something like ' that was my major contribution to the product' and everybody laughed. One of the developers who was working on the project and was British ,with a very correct accent , this guy said 'laughed when I told him the name and it took me some time to understand ... you see we had been developing patches for the original server software and what this guy with his very correct accent said 'Right! We're developing A Patchy Server' :D .

Though i'm not a very great linux user, i somehow find all of it very interesting, if only coding didnt have to be SUCH a prerequisite, i wish I could land up a job in a company like that. Sigh.

I shall try and go to the BLUG conference next year just for the experience, hopefully by then i'll have picked up some skills atleast!