amk

I was addicted to gaming about a year back. But then, I was not working in those days. Now, I usually don't get the time, but I manage once or twice a week for a few hours. I don't enjoy or look forward to playing as I used to before, and apart from the obvious reason that I have started working and I don't have time, I think the other important reason is I have got a lot more social and started going out with friends more often. Gaming can kill productivity when it gets out of control. Programmers may start playing games in the work place when no one is watching. This mostly happens for MMOs, as these games usually hook their players/subscribers for long periods of time. One nice solution to this problem would be go to out more often and start enjoying real life with friends (and maybe encourage/help your employees do the same if there is such a problem)

I have been programming ever since I was a school kid, and I have worked on many small "hobby projects". But I started calling myself a programmer only after I actually started working and earning money as a programmer. I guess I am using the title as a profession more than anything else.

big fan of e text editor. I have been desperately trying to compile the new source code releases for ubuntu but not too successful. (Not to familiar with linux programming/building). It works on wine though.

They do log you in automatically if you are logged in your Google/Yahoo(or any other OpenId provider). However, you have to configure it in the account settings first.

This was a very big issue in my previous place of work. It really got to me, to the point that I actually quit and found another job. So, speaking from personal experience, it will also severely affect your programmers' morale if they just spend all their time doing little things on many different projects, rather than work on something big and worthwhile.

The solution: Get proper project management practises in place. Split up a project's work in quantums of atleast 3 days. Don't discuss other projects when your programmers are busy working on something.

po has an interesting point. Don't take very small projects which don't fit in your schedule. Another approach would be to talk and upgrade small projects to bigger projects and quote more time for them.

I am not so sure what you mean by "non-spammy way". As an avid twitter user, I would certainly mind it if the people I follow start tweeting ads on my timeline. Actually clicking on these ads is just out of the question. But then again, I am not speaking from the perspective of either of your customers: The ad publishers or the advertisers.

I have just two really simple bug fixes to be completed, and there is no more work assigned to me yet. But I just can't bring myself to complete it. I have been very lazy for the past 2-3 days :(

what's a carputer?

Thanks for the link. I will waiting for this game to come out.

"A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids." hehehe..

I would go with Wordpress despite the fact that I am a web developer. For websites which mainly consist of content, it doesn't make sense to develop something off the ground. And static HTML is a bad idea as its hard to maintain and change unless there is one person dedicated to the task. CMS's like Wordpress also makes it easier to be consistent in your design using themes and templates. In any case, whenever I use Wordpress, I dig into the templates and modify the HTML/CSS to my needs.

Actually, there are tons of software related startups. Good electronics startups would be a little harder to find. I will look around and let you know.

That number won't be important because it varies widely from startup to startup. It depends on the type of product, how long it will take to conceptualize and develop, and also the people behind it. It could be as little as 2 months to as long as 2 years.

Learn PHP, but please, please, learn to write clean and manageable code. I highly recommend picking up a framework along with php. Good ones are Symfony and Cakephp. I would have suggested Python but php is much easier to learn and deploy.

I am in Bangalore. And you can startups everywhere here! There's like 5 on every street in every locality! I am a final year engineering student and I have already worked in 3 different startups(out of which only one went totally bust).

I don't know about the word test scores but the rest of the demographic info doesn't look right. For instance, the second chart. The data suggests that statistically, the odds of a girl drinking are higher than an african-american drinking.

By the way, very very misleading graphs. I was totally shocked by going through them. I had to read the comments here to realize what was being shown.

I think Google Maps has a "reverse geocoding" api. That's probably what you need.