Entries from May 2006 ↓

I was talking to a friend today and said “you can’t expect them to accept you unless you accept them”!

I realized this was a big idea! All too often we want people to accept us the way we are. But we won’t accept them the way they are (probably that’s why we want them to accept us the way we are!). That’s so much irony! If you accept the other person the way s/he is, you don’t even need them to accept you the way you are! Because you are ok either ways!

Most important thing about acceptance: accept the other person the way s/he is, and not only that, but the way s/he is NOT!

Business 2.0 magazine has a piece on 5 valley startups that will change the world. From $300 student laptops to prefab homes, to playing games with your thoughts! These ideas are really cool, and have the potential to make a huge impact. Check them out!

Business 2.0 - Five startups out to change the world

It’s become so darn difficult to find good programmers (or managers) these days! Watching some TV show the other day and it said IT companies are going to have 45% shortfall on their recruitment needs this year!

We are already facing it! We’ve been running our current recruitment drive for last two months, and have nowhere touched the numbers we wanted to. I remember we used to have the office full with candidates taking the tests / interviews on weekends. Now many don’t even turn up after confirmation.

I thought this may be happening with us, checked up with a few friends and its the same story all over.

The big guys hire straight from the engineering colleges (and they are going beyond the top 125 colleges too now), so the small and medium timers don’t have anything left. It actually means they don’t have much left not only in terms of freshers, but also experienced guys.

Training is the only answer people say. Hire any reasonably guy and train him/her to your levels.

Are we software companies or training institutes?

Incidently, there are multiple travels that I have to manage these days. Attending weddings, business visit, family outing, religious trip and another wedding!

I am just going through the pains of getting people together for the travel. Different people have different motivations and constraints. When you want all to be together - or even a majority - it gets difficult. Especially because there is no consensus and there are other priorities coming in between.

Two colleagues are getting married in third week of June, one after another. So the office team is planning to attend the wedding. It’s a long journey and would involve some days off work. Not everybody is ready for it. I tried many things to get things together and plan the itinerary. As of now, I am not sure what is going to happen.

We have also been planning some family outing. All cousins were ready for a trekking trip, then we thought about Kerala. Now thinking about Goa. The pattern is repeating here - initial enthusiasm, some work being done, then people opting out one by one.

When it’s a smaller group, things move much better. The religious trip is well planned. The friend wedding will also be.

I am trying to figure out what’s missing. Is it the opportunity? Am I missing on reality? Or is it just the group dynamics?

I am facing a peculiar problem. Looks like it is a pdf2swf issue, I am pretty much frustrated with it. Posting it here to see if somebody can solve it!

I have pdf2swf installed on a Linux server. A user would upload a PDF file, pdf2swf converts that to swf and then we show it in a Flash app. We also show JPGs in the app - uploaded in a similar manner.

Now, the PDF is being converted to SWF successfully. If I load up the SWF in the browser, it shows up fine. But it does not show up in the Flash app.

We are using the Loader component in Flash 8. It does emit all the events of load progress, and also shows the event when the file has been completely loaded. Despite it being loaded completely, the swf does NOT show up in the loader.

I checked up for stupid mistakes I could make. Position of the content in loader, transparency, correct filenames, permission check - but everything seems to be in order. The same loader can easily load JPGs and other SWFs - the ones which are not created by pdf2swf.

I tried various options with pdf2swf command line - but none solved the problem.

I am stuck with this and would really like some help!

Can anybody throw some light on this?