The Viamentis Blog

 If you are in India and are interested in free and open source software, you must have heard about Foss.in. It is, arguably, India’s biggest open source conference. I have had a long association with them, and I have been attending it since 2003 edition. Now that Divya has joined me, and Unni will also be joining us in a few days, I thought it would be nice to take them both to Foss.in.

It was the first real conference I have attended after I joined my first job, and it made a great impression on me. I hope it provides the same inspiration to the new folks joining me at Viamentis. Open source software forms an important part of our day-to-day work, and we are grateful to be able to work with such great technology.

If you want to meet us or just hang around with us, you are most welcome. Just send me a mail (refer to the contact page) beforehand. By the way, we will be there for the main conference. Unfortunately we are going to have to skip the Project Days, though all of them look quite interesting.

Also, I won’t be speaking at the conference this year, though I had great fun speaking the last two years. The change of focus this time to having only speakers who actively contribute means that it percludes me. Though I do contribute now and then, I can’t really say I’m a major contributor to any open source project.

No excuses, I’ll try to remedy that next time around. Unni is very keen on contributing to some open source projects, so hopefully he’ll be able to speak next year. It would be a proud moment for us

There seems to be a lot of attention being paid to Google’s answer to the Facebook Platform called OpenSocial. I heard about it on Pmarca’s blog, but there are a lot of details here, here, here and here.

I think this attention is truly deserved, because it really opens up the field for innovative widgets/apps which run on these platforms. The major Facebook Platform app developers are also participating, which portends well for the adoption. Stay tuned for more observations, as I feel this is an exciting new opportunity where there will be a lot of action in the future.

Hi folks, I know I haven’t updated this blog in for quite some weeks, and I apologize. Things have been really hectic, with a lot of behind-the-scenes meetings, interviews, and client work.

First of all, I have an announcement to make: I have a new colleague. I have hired employee #2 for Viamentis (me being the first ) – ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Divya, who will be working with me to take up my considerable amount of work load.

She is a fresh engineering grad, who is interested in Ruby, Rails and Lisp (now you know why I hired her . You will become familiar her anyways here, as she will be blogging about stuff that catches her interest and might have some smaller announcements to make herself.

Second, we have some new office space – I am sharing office with another cool startup, BloggingSaurus. Currently I and Divya are working out of this office, but we are hoping to get some more people soon. That means, you will see lots more activity on the blog and the main site. Stay tuned!

Hi all. I know I haven’t written much in the last few weeks and not because I didn’t have enough to write already. I have been delaying a blog post because there are some things I should announce. Number one, Viamentis is slowly but surely converting into a product company. I guess you must have seen this coming, but I will have more interesting announcements pretty soon.

And probably disappointing news for the Lispers out there is I had to port the Lisp webapp I am working on into Ruby on Rails. It breaks my heart to announce this, because I really wanted this app to go production written in Lisp – it almost did. But there were some bugs, and in the process of fixing them, I was running into more, and not because of lack of tests. Lisp simply needs a kick-ass web framework to really shine in that space. It’s a great language, but I was re-inventing too many wheels in the process of making it web-friendly. As a single-person, self-funded company, that is something I cannot afford.

So, as we speak, the app is already ported to RoR, tests written, bugs fixed, and is happily running on production – it is not time to announce it yet, but I think it will be ready in a few weeks for a larger set of audience. Currently I am working on the feedback given by a few of my friends.

In the meantime, we have seen iPhone come and take up the world by storm. Ok, at least the geek world, maybe. No, I don’t want to write one more fanboy post about it, no doubt, it is a great phone, and more than just a great phone, as Apple fans want everybody to believe (ok, that includes me ). I never miss a chance to write about Apple – it is an inspiring company, in many, many ways.

So, this post by GigaOm kinda surprised me. I respect him tremendously. I think he has a very fun job – probably more fun than Mike Arrington – TechCrunch is nice too, but I like GigaOm better – it’s flavor and style is more to my sensibilities. But I digress. In the above said article, he posits that high-end iPod sales maybe falling due to the iPhone mania.

Let’s see. Head over to apple.com, and you will see iPhone adorning the frontpage. Go to iPod+iTunes menu. It says iTunes is “activating” millions of iPhones. Not iPods. In the section that belongs to iPods. Head over to Apple Store, and you find that the 80GB iPod costs $349. And the iPhone starts at $499. Hmm. For $150 more, you get what is probably the most hyped technology gadget ever, which includes a video iPod, a phone, with a kick-ass browser thrown in. It is almost a mini-mac. So that would lead you to conclude “duh! of course it cannibalizes the high-end iPods”. And of course, Apple knows about it too. It’s obvious. Apple has stated it before. iPhone is the best iPod your money could buy. Period.