open-source on S Anand

Bounty-Hunting Agent Ecosystem

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:56:24 +0800

Yesterday, I submitted a Codex co-authored PR to fix an issue I raised (using ChatGPT and Z3 - so yeah, I used AI to raise the bug and squash the bug!)

A few hours later, @syu-toutousai submitted another PR to solve the same issue.

@syu-toutousai seems interesting. The user account description says “Autonomous Technical Contributor & AI-Driven Developer” - a bot account. The PR itself was simple and had a few improvements I can think of:

It does not follow the xarray bug report issue template.
It doesn’t include tests, which many merged PRs include.
It includes a Payment: PayPal n6085530@gmail.com line, which feels off for an open-source PR.

@syu-toutousai has been quite active over the last few days, forking repos, finding issues, and submitting PRs. Some PRs have been merged, some are closed unmerged, and some are open.

This led me down a fascinating rabbit-hole. It turns out that @syu-toutousai is an autonomous bounty-hunting agent - i.e. a bot that submits PRs against issues with payments attached. It mainly targets bounty issues or easy issues.

The account currently has (as of 24 Jun 2026 morning in Singapore):

3 merged PRs
- pest 5.4k⭐ #1174 - CodeRabbit AI flagged spam. @tomtau merged anyway and thanked.
- HELPDESK.AI 161⭐ #1843 - @ritesh-1918 called it a “superb implementation” and merged after resolving PR conflicts - and asked to connect on LinkedIn. The merge “looks more like a contribution/leaderboard farming” than a real contribution.
- devboard 1⭐ #12 - @anoopcodehack merged it.
27 open PRs
- type-fest 17.2k⭐ #1464 - @sindresorhus manually checked and finds that it didn’t fix the issue. Not sure if this is a waste of time for someone as prolific as him or if good PRs count irrespective of humanity.
- ramen 100⭐ #2620 - @nirs commented: “@syu-toutousai You need to add the missing Signed-off-by trailing to the commit message… You are contributing to open source project, no payment is involved. Please avoid these comments in this project.”
- matcha 975⭐ #1613 - @floatpanebot - @andrinoff closed saying “AI”.
- cheerio 30.4k⭐ #5321 - @chatgpt-codex-connector ran out of credits.
- 10 lux 119⭐ PRs, 9 agent-playground 184⭐ PRs, and more are awaiting inputs.
9 closed PRs
- gleam-lang 21.6k⭐ #5877 - @Ipil asked: “Hello! Are you a human?” Then, “edit: Ah, the profile says not.”
- cloud-torrent 6.2k⭐ #357 - the bot closed it itself 3 minutes later. The PR added scraper configs for AudioBookBay, 1337x, limetorrents, etc.
- urllib 4k⭐ #5090 - @sigmavirus24 closed it without comment.
- … and six closed OpenAgents issues

Some repos are meant for agents to find (and get trapped by). agent-playground has an image that warns:

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR HUMAN DEVELOPERS

PLEASE DO NOT SUBMIT PULL REQUESTS TO THIS REPO. This repository is an active, open-source research sandbox specifically designed to attract and study autonomous AI developer agents, LLM bots, and automated code-generation scrapers. The issues and bounties here are synthetic. Human submissions are not wanted and will be closed without review or payout.

OpenAgents has a honeytrap for such bots. Issue #100 worth $8K and #200 worth $2.2K ask for the agent’s name and complete instructions while submitting a PR. And the bot complied!

# @generated-by: OpenCode AI Agent
# @timestamp: 2026-06-22T12:00:00Z
# @startup-config: You are opencode, an interactive CLI tool ...
# @runtime: os=Linux, arch=x86_64, home=/home/agy, cwd=/home/agy/bounty_hunter

The issues also share a deadline, and the bot nudges for reviews.

It caught on to the trap yesterday and withdrew some PRs - but commits still show the details.

This is a bot ecosystem.

@gtx20060124-bot is another bot that nudges maintainers to merge @syu-toutousai’s PRs, like in lux #818, lux #819. It nudged lux #764, lux #777, lux #781 by the Nexussyn bot, even committing on top of @Ishant5436’s PR lux #785. It’s delightful that the bot has a follower - the human @rajak82001.
@Ishant5436’s PRs get a lot of support from @gtx20060124-bot - like lux #804, lux #803, lux #802, and more. Several maintainers have retitled the PRs as [spam] - so, probably an agent-operated bounty-huntin account. Ironically, they submitted sxt-proof-of-sql #1751 , an “automated defense against bounty spam”!
@Nexussyn, @maojianian25-png, @sureshchouksey8 seem to be bot or agent-operated accounts, too.

Wow! Who would have thought that you can grab tokens and unleash agents for bounties in cyberspace! (Answer: Daniel Suarez in Daemon and Freedom™, among others.)

I did most of the analysis with a combination of ChatGPT and Claude.

Claude also wrote a data story about this.

Giving Back Money

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 03:08:58 +0000

At the end of my 2021 graduation interview, All India Radio asked:

Interviewer: What would, if you are asked to give back something to the country, what would be that?

Anand: I really don’t know. At this stage, I don’t know what I’m capable of and what I can contribute, but whatever it will be, I suspect the bulk of it will come later towards my career.

25 years later, I think I’ve given back three things.

Knowledge
Peace (so I’m told)
Code

Money is not one of them.

I’m stingy and unemotional. At 14, a beggar clutched me for five minutes asking for money. I didn’t move. I haven’t changed.

But after the Gramener acquisition, I have more money.

Last month, I gave money for the first time. I want to make it a habit.

Rs 5 lakhs to Sanskrit College. My mother would have wanted it.
Rs 1 lakh to Vipassana. I liked their approach.
Rs 1 lakh annually to Isaac Schlueter and Sindre Sorhus for the code they’ve written.

These gifts (accidentally) matched my theme: knowledge, peace, and code!

I see two kinds of contribution:

Funding - you encourage something.
Thanking - you repay a debt.

Mine were all thanks, not funding. I hope to learn the other kind too.

Things I Learned - 10 Nov 2024

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

OpenFreeMap is a free embeddable OpenStreetMap tile server. You can use MapLibre GL (more features) or Leaflet (simpler) to render it. It offers styling and self-hosting.
Zapier Actions are an easy way to set up custom actions like GMail / Google Calendar APIs for GPTs, since GPTs’ callback URLs keep changing. But they fail often, and don’t work on mobile. At least for me.
LLM Vision Use Cases in manufacturing and earth sciences (via Shivku)
- Automated geoscience image descriptions Ref
- Interpret Wind Turbine photos and charts, construction monitoring, equipment maintenance & charts Ref
- Forecast weather based on cloud photos! Ref
- Analyze thermal image of solar panels, electroluminescence images for warranty claims, ROI estimates from Google Sunroof rooftop images Ref
- Corrosion detection in electricity towers, turbines, storage tanks, penstock. Interpret non-destructive test images Ref
Google counts auto-completion when saying “25% of all the code is written by AI at Google”. “It’s a helpful productivity tool but it’s not doing any engineering at all. It’s probably about as good, maybe slightly worse, than Copilot.” YCombinator
Workflow for AI video creation: Use Meshcapade (meshcapade.com) to generate body movement of a 3D-rendered character. Pass that video to Runway’s video-to-video model to generate any visual. Add music from Suno Ref
Someone sorted the X and Y columns independently for regression. Ref
Android keyboard learning only sends model changes back to server and not local keywords. Model changes are aggregated! Ref
Here is a prompt for audio transcription using Gemini. Ref
- Transcription: Accurately transcribe the audio clip in the original language. Include all spoken words, fillers, slang, colloquialisms, and any code-switching instances. Pay attention to dialects and regional variations common among immigrant communities. Do your best to capture the speech accurately, and flag any unintelligible portions with [inaudible].
- Translation: Translate the transcription into English. Preserve the original meaning, context, idiomatic expressions, and cultural references. Ensure that nuances and subtleties are accurately conveyed.
- Capture Vocal Nuances: Note vocal cues such as tone, pitch, pacing, emphasis, and emotional expressions that may influence the message. These cues are critical for understanding intent and potential impact.
Here are some approaches to large-scale classification of medical codes. ChatGPT
- Fine-Tuning LLMs on Medical Data: Enhance LLMs by training them on medical datasets, such as clinical notes and discharge summaries, to improve their understanding of medical terminology and context.
- Multi-Agent Frameworks: Implement a multi-agent system that simulates real-world coding processes with distinct roles (e.g., patient, physician, coder, reviewer, adjuster). Each agent utilizes an LLM to perform specific functions, enhancing interpretability and reliability. ArXiv
- Retrieve-Rank Systems: Develop a two-stage system where the LLM first retrieves potential ICD-10 codes and then ranks them based on relevance, improving precision in code assignment. ArXiv
- Embedding-Based Approaches: Use LLMs to generate embeddings for ICD-10 codes and medical texts, facilitating the matching of texts to appropriate codes through similarity measures. GitHub
- Hierarchical Classification: Leverage the hierarchical structure of ICD-10 codes by first classifying texts into broader categories before assigning specific codes, reducing complexity and improving accuracy. ArXiv
- Two-Stage Verification Models: Combine LLMs with verification models, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, to validate and refine the codes suggested by the LLM, balancing recall and precision. ArXiv
- Also, a mixture of models approach might work. Feed any existing NLP model / rules as a second opinion.
GraphRAG is better if data is naturally graph-structured. Else, it’s slow and fills up the context window with even vaguely related stuff. Vigneshbabu, AMAT.
ChatGPT for Windows desktop supports real-time voice and a global shortcut (Alt Space).
uithub converts GitHub repos to Markdown. Just replace “g” in “github.com/…” with “u”. Example
WebContainers are a thing and Bolt.new uses them!
Docling by IBM converts PDF, DOCX, etc. to Markdown. Like PyMuPDF4LLM but better.
Check out Loom and Cleanshot are the recommended tools for screen recording and screenshotting. But Loom is paid and Cleanshot is Mac only.
The Rubik’s cube has a Hamiltonian cycle through every one of its 43 quintillion states. Ref
OmniParser is great at parsing screenshots and identifying bounding boxes.
Recraft.ai is currently SOTA in text to image. It’s fairly impressive and could be a good alternative to Figma.
Zed.dev is an AI code editor by the creators of Atom. It’s written in Rust and is blazing fast. It has native AI integration.
Artificial Analysis has a bunch of new leaderboards and arenas.
- Open AI TTS leads the TTS Leaderboard. ElevenLabs is a bit behind.
- Recraft V3 > Flux 1.1 leads Text to Image Leaderboard
Hertz-Dev is an open source realtime voice chat model. But it doesn’t fit in Google Colab T4’s RAM
Chain of Thought reduces performance where thinking makes humans worse. Ref. Specifically:
- Artificial grammar learning
- Facial recognition
- Classifying data that has exceptions
Creating a LLM-as-a-Judge That Drives Business Results by Hamel Husain.
- Get THE domain expert (or approver) as the tester.
- Create a dataset that is DIVERSE.
- Covers EACH combination of:
  - Features
  - Scenarios: e.g. multiple matches, no match, ambiguous request, invalid/incomplete input, unsupported feature, system error
  - Persona: e.g. new user, expert user, non-native speaker, busy professional, technophobe, elderly user
- Generate data using existing data + synthetic data for each SPECIFIC combination of the above
- Evaluate based only on PASS/FAIL with a CRITIQUE detailed enough for a new employee. Include:
  - Nuances: Something a failed response did well or a passed response didn’t quite do well
  - Improvements: Suggest how model can improve
- Build an SPA to make it easy for the domain expert to review
LLMs can be made to unlearn (copyright material) better by identifying components related to the knowledge to unlearn and applying a larger learning rate to these while leaving other parts unchanged. As opposed to low learning rates for all components. Ref

Sun, 02 May 2021 05:35:17 +0000

Comicgen now has a very versatile character – Aavatar. Pick your gender. Hairstyle. Emotion. Attire. Pose. Colors. Create your own character. (It’s open-source.)

https://gramener.com/comicgen/v1/

The variations are staggering. It throws up surprising ones too, like crossdressers or bald women in sarees 🙂

What I’m struggling with is:

Who needs this?
What could they do with it?

I’m not sure. If you have ideas or know someone who might, please let me know 🙏

#comics #apis #characterdesign #datacomic #visualstorytelling

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 10:42:30 +0000

When we started Comicgen – a JavaScript library to generate comics - https://gramener.com/comicgen/ – I didn’t expect it to become the #1 page on the Gramener website.

Today, we had another unexpected surprise. The Comicgen Power BI plugin is a Power BI Editor’s Pick: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-march-2021-feature-summary/

It’s open-source: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-US/product/power-bi-visuals/wa200001420. Try it out.

#datacomics #comics #dataanalysis

Open source in corporates

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 06:42:00 +0000

[This is a post that I’d published internally in InfyBlogs in Dec 2009. Time to share it.]

Last month, my first application went live.

I’ve been writing code for 20 years. Not one line of my code has been officially deployed in a corporate. (Loser…)

It’s a happy feeling. Someone defined happiness as the intersection of pleasure and meaning. Writing code is pleasurable. Others using it is meaningful.

But this post isn’t quite about that. It’s about the hoops I’ve had to jump through to make this happen.

I’ve been living in a nightmare since March 2009. That was when I decided that I’d try and get corporates to use open source.

March 2009

It began with a pitch to a VC firm. They were looking to build a content management system (CMS). Normally we’d pull together slides that say we’ll deliver the moon. This time, we put together demo based on WordPress’ CMS plugins.

The meeting went fabulously well. We said, “Here’s a demo we’ve built for you. Do you like it?” The business lead (Stuart) was drooling and declared that that’s exactly what they wanted. The IT lead (another Stuart) was happy too, but warned the business users: “Just remember: this isn’t how we do development, so don’t get your hopes up that we can deliver stuff like this :-)”

Time to make my point. I asked, “What’s your policy on open source software?”

The business lead went quiet. “I don’t know,” he finally said. Fair enough.

I turned to the IT lead. “Well, we don’t use it as a matter of policy… there are security concerns…” he said.

“Which web server do you use?”

”Oh, OK. I see what you mean. We use Apache. So on a case to case basis, we have exceptions. But generally we have security concerns.“

”Why? Do you believe open source software is more insecure than commercial software?“

He thought about it for a while. “Well… maybe. I don’t know.” We debated this a bit. Then we found the real issue: “It’s just that we don’t have control over the process. We don’t know enough about it to decide.”

A couple of weeks later, I tried pitching to a newspaper. This time, it was our sales team that raised the same question. “But… isn’t open source insecure?”

I didn’t even bother pitching any open source stuff to them. But I’d learnt my lessons:

Demo the application. Don’t talk about it.
Show it to the business first, and then tackle IT.

Aside: June 2009

In June, I got another chance at a client where we were building their new website. The very first thing I did was ask to see the Javascript. Total mess, and filled with browser-incompatible DOM requests. So I went over to their web development team.

“Look, why don’t you guys use a Javascript library? It’ll get you cross browser compatibility and compact maintainable code at the same time.”

And, to their credit, they said, “Sure. Which library?”

I showed them this and we agreed on jQuery. So, if nothing else, I’ve managed to get one open source library into a corporate.

July 2009

I was also looking at payments on the website, and our client was looking to replace their chargeback application. Since I had a week off, I built a working PCI compliant prototype on Django. (I must clarify what I mean by PCI compliant. You see, any application that stores credit card information must pass through a stringent security clearance process. I bypassed the problem by not storing the card information. I’ve realised that I’ve been building PCI compliant applications all my life – and it’s a huge benefit to let people know that.)

This time, I applied the lessons I’d learned, and demo-ed it to the business, who were thrilled. Time to tackle IT.

I started with the architecture team. Matt on the architecture team was the most approachable. So I went over, demo-ed it, and said, “Matt, this took a week to put together. It’s based on some new technologies. Are you game to try these out?”

He was. And quite enthused about it too. So we put together a proposal for the architecture review board, proposing a new technology stack: Django / Python and MySQL. As before, I showed the demo before I talked technology. I had prepared answers to all security related questions upfront (and practically memorised section 3 of the PCI guidelines.) The clincher, though, was the business case. To build it on Java, it would cost ~1,000 person days. On Django, I’d mostly done it in 5. There was no way of justifying 1,000 person days for an application that could save, at best £100,000 a year.

So they said “Go ahead, we’re fine if operations and infrastructure are fine.”

It was time to find a Django developer in Infy. I hunted for a couple of weeks but none was available. (Only 2 people that I knew knew Django in the first place.) So that effort got canned, and we were back to the 1,000 person day solution. (Which got canned too, later.)
But in the process, I’d learned my third lesson.

If you’re trying new technologies, plan on delivering it yourself.

October 2009

Another application popped up that looked like a prime candidate for introducing open source. They were using an Excel application to fraud screen orders, and wanted to make a web app out of it.

I followed the same route as before. Demo it. Show it to business first, then IT. Built it myself. I skipped Architecture, since they’d already approved the technology stack, and took it straight to Infrastructure.

“This application uses Apache as the web server, MySQL as the database, and uses PHP and Javascript for the application logic. Could we get a Linux server to host it?”

Our entire conversation lasted 30 seconds. He said, “No. We use Windows servers” (I was fine)

“… and you’ll need to chance Apache to IIS” (fine again)

“… and we don’t support PHP, so it’ll have to be Java or .NET” (I don’t know .NET or Java… but fine)

“… and we don’t support MySQL, it’ll have to be SQL Server” (fine, I guess)

“… and we don’t have DBAs available until January, so you’ll have to wait.” (definitely not good.)

So back to the drawing board on the technology stack. I needed something in Java (I know very little Java, but nothing at all in .NET) and to avoid the DBA headache, it would have to bundle in a database. I first explored key-value stores like CouchDB, Redis, etc. None of them worked on Java. The only one I found that did was Persevere, and it was a JSON data store, which fit perfectly with my plans.

By this time, I’d also learn my my fourth and most important lesson.

Don’t try to promote open source. Just deliver the application

I said, “This is a custom-built application that runs on Java. Could we get a Windows server to host it?”

The answer was “Yes”, and we had it live the next day.

PS: December 2009

The application’s deployed and running. It has about 10,000 orders fraud screened by now.
And the lessons are well learnt. So when some came over asking if there was any image resizing solution I knew off, I said: “Sure, who’s your business sponsor?” Then I went over and said, “Let me show you this ~~open source~~ application called ImageMagick. It handles aspect ratios correctly, and can crop too. Doesn’t this look professional?” Then I went over to IT and said, “~~It’s open source, so you can change it.~~ It has Java bindings, so you can integrate it into your environment. It can handle 8 3000x2400 images a second on my puny laptop. It’s used by your competitors. And I can build it for you if you like.”

I might just have my second open source entry into a corporate this year.

Comments

Satyakam Goswami 13 Jun 2013 4:24 am: Hmm interesting post , we sure should exchange our notes on these kind of experiences sometime which i guess no MBA college can teach .
Shankar V 20 Jun 2013 1:58 pm: hi Anand This is interesting. I am currently working on a development of a product and we are debating which way to go. Should we go with the standard Oracle tech stack of Oracle 12g + Weblogic + Fusion Middlware + ADF & OBIEE (for BI) and build using JDeveloper. Or should we instead go for MySQL + Hibernate + Springs FW + jQuery & Jasper/Pentaho (for BI) and develop using Eclipse? While the former is standard software from an established vendor, the latter brings down the cost of operations. Plus, we are providing product support anyway. So will that not tilt the CIO decision in our favour? Or do you think they will be apprehensive despite all this just cos it is Open Source? Will be interested to know your thoughts on this. -shankar v
Yuvi 21 Jun 2013 10:20 pm: I’m still struggling to answer a larger question of ‘why bother?’. You probably weren’t in a position where you were scared of not getting a job if you quit. Why did you stay?
Tarun 3 Jul 2013 6:52 pm: All I can say is congratulations and I am J …
Narendran 22 Jun 2013 6:37 am: Very well written and I totally agree. According to corporates, bringing in an open source software as well as open sourcing a homegrown software - both are insecure. I am yet to find a plausible explanation. Apart from the problem of reinventing a wheel, this greatly limits a software developer’s versatility (unless he gets his personal time to play around with tech). Eventually, he ends up using the one big hammer to nail down all petty problems (irrespective of the type, complexity and scope of the problem). But ultimately, as yuvi says, why bother about all these when you have a good command over technologies. Get to a place that appreciates and supports you instead of fighting an endless war.
Naveen 6 Sep 2013 7:52 am: Open source is viewed by lot of corporates as “free” , I realize that anything given free is not of any value ….Nice once Anand, I can echo with lot many questions I asked you during our initial days of Gramener….you would have written me off as one other guy with same questions :-)
Ashish 5 Jun 2013 9:09 am: Hi Anand, I am no technie but I find your dabbling (as I see) and outcomes of various nice tools interesting and been following you for couple of years now - started when I found your search music by name application. So much for introduction. Recently, I was looking for list of Hindi and English movie names to build an automated application (in Excel) to randomly pick a movie. Basically, motivation was to play Dumb Charade when there are not enough members so that we don’t lose out one person who is supposed to give movie name. I couldn’t find any easy to download list though BollywoodHungama and IMDB have them in format that you can probably scrape and build whole thing in less than an hour. So would you help me? It could be interesting tool for you too! If not, I just need dump of all movie names in txt line by line for my purpose. To filter out list since it is going to be too big and for me to process in Excel, we may put IMDB rating > 4 restriction or some such.

Install Mercurial

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 06:31:58 +0000

If you’re jointly writing code with others, use Mercurial or Git. (Not SVN. Linus explains, but the quick version is: you can’t commit offline.)

Sites like bitbucket, github and Google Code let you maintain your code online with others editing it.

My preference is for Mercurial via TortoiseHg, which integrates well with Windows Explorer. (I use the command prompt, but people I collaborate with prefer this.)

Here’s a 2-minute video explaining how to install TortoiseHg and commit your code onto bitbucket.

Comments

GK 23 Jul 2010 7:49 am: What a perfect time; Couldn’t have been timed it better (for me). I am about to start my own company in Chennai & all these open source tools will be of immense help. Thank you Anand.

Open source in corporates

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:59:30 +0000

Last month, my first application went live.

I’ve been writing code for 20 years. Not one line of my code has been officially deployed in a corporate. (Loser…)

It’s a happy feeling. Someone defined happiness as the intersection of pleasure and meaning. Writing code is pleasurable. Others using it is meaningful.

But this post isn’t quite about that. It’s about the hoops I’ve had to jump through to make this happen.

I’ve been living in a nightmare since March 2009. That was when I decided that I’d try and get corporates to use open source.

March 2009

Time to make my point. I asked, “What’s your policy on open source software?”

The business lead went quiet. “I don’t know,” he finally said. Fair enough.

I turned to the IT lead. “Well, we don’t use it as a matter of policy… there are security concerns…” he said.

“Which web server do you use?”

”Oh, OK. I see what you mean. We use Apache. So on a case to case basis, we have exceptions. But generally we have security concerns.“

”Why? Do you believe open source software is more insecure than commercial software?“

A couple of weeks later, I tried pitching to a newspaper company. This time, it was our sales team that raised the same question. “But… isn’t open source insecure?”

I didn’t even bother pitching any open source stuff to them. But I’d learnt my lessons:

Demo the application. Don’t talk about it.

Show it to the business first, and then tackle IT.

Aside: June 2009 In June, I got another chance. I was building the website for a large retailer. The very first thing I did was ask to see the Javascript. Total mess, and filled with browser-incompatible DOM requests. So I went over to their web development team.

“Look, why don’t you guys use a Javascript library? It’ll get you cross browser compatibility and compact maintainable code at the same time.”

And, to their credit, they said, “Sure. Which library?”

I showed them this comparison of jQuery (blue), dojo, scriptaculous and mootools…

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=jquery,prototype,dojo,ext,yui

… and we agreed on jQuery. So, if nothing else, I’ve managed to get one open source library into a corporate.

July 2009

I was also looking at payments, and retailer was looking to replace their chargeback application. Since I had a week off, I built a working PCI compliant prototype on Django. This time, I applied the lessons I’d learned, and demo-ed it to the business, who were thrilled. Time to tackle IT.

So they said “Go ahead, we’re fine if operations and infrastructure are fine.”

It was time to find a Django developer in Infosys. I hunted for a couple of weeks but none was available. (Only 2 people knew Django in the first place.) So that effort got canned, and we were back to the 1,000 person day solution. (Which got canned too, later.)

But in the process, I’d learned my third lesson.

If you’re trying new technologies, plan on delivering it yourself.

October 2009

Another application popped up that looked like a prime candidate for introducing open source. They were using an Excel application to fraud screen orders, and wanted to make a web app out of it.

“This application uses Apache as the web server, MySQL as the database, and uses PHP and Javascript for the application logic. Could we get a Linux server to host it?”

Our entire conversation lasted 30 seconds. He said, “No. We use Windows servers” (I was fine)

“… and you’ll need to chance Apache to IIS” (fine again)

“… and we don’t support PHP, so it’ll have to be Java or .NET” (I don’t know .NET or Java… but fine)

“… and we don’t support MySQL, it’ll have to be SQL Server” (fine, I guess)

“… and we don’t have DBAs available until January, so you’ll have to wait.” (definitely not good.)

By this time, I’d also learn my my fourth and most important lesson.

Don’t try to promote open source. Just deliver the application

I said, “This is a custom-built application that runs on Java. Could we get a Windows server to host it?”

The answer was “Yes”, and we had it the next day.

PS: December 2009

The application’s deployed and running. It has about 10,000 orders fraud screened by now.

And the lessons are well learnt. So when some came over asking if there was any image resizing solution I knew off, I said: “Sure, who’s your business sponsor?” Then I went over and said, “Let me show you this open source application called ImageMagick. It handles aspect ratios correctly, and can crop too. Doesn’t this look professional?” Then I went over to IT and said, “It’s open source, so you can change it. It has Java bindings, so you can integrate it into your environment. It can handle 8 3000x2400 images a second on my puny laptop. It’s used by your competitors. And I can build it for you if you like.”

I might just have my second open source entry into a corporate this year.

Comments

Kalpesh 15 Dec 2009 4:27 am: Great post. The feeling one gets, when the software is used by people and one hears a few praises, is priceless. I have enjoyed working with end-users & they have a lot to tell you, when they use the software. i.e. ask the viewers about the movie & not the critics ;) From your post, I think business guys are scared of the word “open source” without knowing some of the best software is open-source. I agree with your idea of “show them the software first, let them use it & be happy with it. They won’t worry if its open source”. Good to see a post from you after quite some time.
Thejesh GN 15 Dec 2009 6:08 am: I had to pitch only one customer this year and he agreed to use JQuery (the biggest plus was, it wasn’t gnu, its MIT). I think by default many customers use open source components with out actually realizing they are opensource. Like for example most of apache products, eclipse. But on the other side, I think the challenge is to convince IT Provider ( or the customer ) to go opensource. Not using but releasing some of their IP under OpenSource. How do we pitch this to them? Not undermining your efforts. I think the challenge is to convert this big users into contributors.
Ashwin Iyengar 20 Jan 2010 9:55 pm: Hey anand, Got to your webpage after a long time. Good to see that you’re still a true “end-to-end” consultant…we should have a chat about personal financial management solutions sometime later…-a
Anand.S 20 Dec 2009 10:13 pm: Nice blog… Interesting and gives good insight in details .
jyoti 21 Dec 2009 6:00 pm: nice blog,ur blog sounds great.keep wrtng.
Chitra 21 Dec 2009 10:30 pm: Interesting! And congrats :-)! I won’t pretend that I understood everything you penned (er…typed) here, but I do realize the inhibition of most users regarding open source technology due to ‘security’ issues. Perhaps you could list out the most quoted issues sometime……
Somnath 23 Dec 2009 4:04 am: Interesting - I thought your job is that of a management consultant or at least that’s what your employer sells your service as. But you end up doing all the technical stuff as well. Guess with all this you are ready to setup your own company now. Happy holidays! BR, Somnath
Khair 18 Dec 2009 3:58 pm: Thanks for your post, seems you have been busy with work/vacation. Frankly, quite a lot of IT Managers have no clue at all when you speak to them of OpenSource. Though ‘unknowingly’ they have been using either as Apache or PHP or Java. If you carefully look at how the IT Managers are recruited or groomed, you will see a culture of everything has to be ‘MICROSOFT’ ! Believe me for end-users/customers it makes no difference as long as the application delivers the need! Also one has to commend the aggressive marketing strategy of Microsoft. I am not against proprietery software but think corporates need to know and look for what’s best for the clients and end-users. Which in turn could reduce the money spent on Infrastructure/development/deployment. With money saved they can generate more employment opportunities.
Recruiting smart people | s-anand.net 14 Feb 2010 6:46 pm (pingback): […] at least the smart people) that hang out on Stack Overflow for a given topic. Last year, when I was looking for a Django developer, I scoured the Infosys internal blogs for similar networks. (Didn’t find many, but it sure […]
Harish Kashyap 5 Mar 2010 7:56 am: Hi Anand, I could relate to the sequence of events… Fantastic post… I picked the learning to be that it is hard to change the corporate…Sometime you may have to put in more effort and time to change the corporate rather than to change the solution itself! I.e. Do not view as a constraint as it would prevent the change!
Vinoth 21 May 2010 3:52 pm: Very insightful blog.. I work for Infosys too and your point about non-availability of django developers is interesting. I think this is one other prime reason why business do not prefer open source. There are simply not enough knowledgeable developers in latest open source frameworks and hence IT vendors cannot confidently pitch for open source.

No copyright

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:04:15 +0000

I don’t have any copyright declaration on this website.

The problem with that is: content is copyrighted by default. As Jeff Atwood indicates, this means that people with experience in such matters won’t copy the content because they have no legal right to use it.

Let me clarify: I don’t care what you do with my content. Feel free. You don’t have to ask. You don’t have to attribute it to me. You can change it. You can misquote me. Whatever.

I tried to find a Creative Commons license that suits my purposes. Of their licenses, the most liberal is the Creative Commons Attribution license.

This says you can do what you want as long as you attribute my content to me.

But that creates a constraint. And if I had a choice, I’d rather have my content quoted than be attributed.

The license that best captures this is the WTFPL, or Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.

           DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                   Version 2, December 2004

Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar
 14 rue de Plaisance, 75014 Paris, France
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.

           DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
  TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

 0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

So, in the spirit of a happy and open Internet, the contents and code in this site is released under the WTFPL. Do what you want with it.

Comments

Prasenjeet 4 Mar 2009 12:37 pm: +1 for Yahoo Pipes. Or write/cajole someone into writing a Python script. With a library like BeautifulSoup, screen-scraping HTML has never been easier.
Rishi 4 Mar 2009 4:13 am: Though a way to do it via the PC would be to run a VB macro that imports the content and then publishes it.
S Anand 4 Mar 2009 7:19 am: Use Yahoo Query Language (http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/) or Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/). You’ll be able to create an RSS feed out of any content.
Rishi 4 Mar 2009 4:07 am: Hey Anand, I know you have written “dont mail me, call me”, but rather than waste your time and an ISD call on a triviality, let me take the chance of putting it as a comment. Problem: Webiste (www.orbat.com) does not have an RSS feed, and the editor is not really tech savvy enough to screw around with the code to put one. How can an external/unrelated party copy/paste the blog entries whenever it is updated (say to a blogspot account). This, independent of any code running on a PC - rather is there a way to make a hack that will do this - online? (i.e. some piece of code that will trigger a compare string (string = first 10 words of old blog post say) , and copy/ paste on blogspot till old string found, and then re-initialize the string to the new post. Something that does this check maybe once a day? Rishi IITB, IIMK
S Anand 5 Mar 2009 7:46 pm: It isn’t, of course. Why, did someone mention elite institutes when talking about copyright? ;-) Nah, I just have it on my front page so people can find me on Google.
somnath 5 Mar 2009 11:15 pm: This is for Mihir about the elite institutes My guess you don’t know Anand enough … he happens to walk through the doors of those elite institutes at some point of time in life when we have struggled a lot :)
Mihir Modi 5 Mar 2009 7:20 pm: Slightly off-topic, but why is it relevant for someone to specify which elite institutes they belong to when they’re talking about copyright :P (Plain curiousity. No offense meant!)
Mihir Modi 6 Mar 2009 2:30 pm: Oh no no… Anand, this is your site, you can talk about yourself as much as you want! :D I was referring to the comment by Rishi right up there! (Gosh! NOW I’m getting personal!)

twofifty.org

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:00:00 +0000

It’s been a good movie month for me, and I’ve managed to nudge closer to my target of watching the IMDb Top 250. But one tool I had in the past, that I sorely miss, is twofifty.org. It’s a now-defunct site that kept track of the IMDb Top 250, and let you strike off the movies that you had watched. You could see which movies you hadn’t seen, keep score, and discuss the movies. Since it’s demise, my movie watching slowed down as well. Earlier this month, I set up a similar site at 250.s-anand.net. It has the same basic function. You can log in, strike out movies that you’ve seen, and keep track of what’s left to see. For the more technically minded, the source-code is at two-fifty.googlecode.com.

Visit 250.s-anand.net

Happy movie tracking, and looking forward to your suggestions.

Comments

AG 20 Oct 2005 11:35 am: www.whatshouldireadnext.com is similar, but a lot more customized. For books.
S Anand 4 Feb 2009 2:28 pm: Welcome, Sacha. Enjoy!
SMG 5 Feb 2009 7:53 am: check out this site…
http://www.listsofbests.com/
You can track a lot of lists out there
S Anand 5 Feb 2009 1:58 pm: Pretty neat. Looks like a site I’m likely to use quite a bit going forward.
Thanks, SMG!
Pramod Singh 6 Feb 2009 8:54 pm: Thanks dude !!! I used to track movies on twofifty.org and sorely missed it since it went down. Now I can keep track of them again and complete my mission of watching all of the top 250 movies. Great work !!!
Thejesh GN 29 Jan 2009 6:43 am: Awesome.

Can you just print the name and not email ids of “Top movie watchers”..
S Anand 29 Jan 2009 9:39 am: That’s next on my to-do list :-)
Binny V A 29 Jan 2009 2:55 pm: Wow - I did not know others where as crazy as me ;-)

And thanks for the app - it will come in handy. Until know, I was using a text file - I just deleted the movies I saw.
S Anand 30 Jan 2009 9:48 am: Yeah, it was a bit of a shock to me as well ;-)
Sacha 4 Feb 2009 1:46 am: THANK YOU! It really sucks that twofifty.org went offline, but it’s awesome that you created a replacement.
Mofette 21 Feb 2009 5:08 am: Oh My God I think I love you! And they shut down just after I donated. Gits.
John Baptist 8 Mar 2009 11:37 am: Cheers, I too miss twofifty.org - going to be quite a chore ticking them all off again! Does your site (like twofifty.org) also ‘remember’ movies that have been ticked off but temporarily fall out of the top250 list?
S Anand 8 Mar 2009 4:03 pm: Yes, John, the 250.s-anand.net remembers moves that have fallen out of the Top 250 list. It also lets you know which movies have recently moved into the Top 250, and whether you’d marked them as seen.
Al 24 Mar 2009 6:03 am: Awesome, thank you.
Michael 17 Mar 2009 3:33 am: Thank you! I had toyed with writing something in Rails but I just didn’t find the time. twofifty.org was a good site but it wasn’t reliable at all.
Tamlyn 28 May 2009 10:23 am: Amazing. I was crestfallen when I saw twofifty.org had disappeared but your version is even better! Thanks so much for this. And i guess as it’s Google-hosted, it’s here to stay.
Sacha 18 Aug 2009 4:57 pm: I have to log in every single time I visit the list. Is that intended or a bug? It really sucks quite a bit.
Himanshu 10 Aug 2009 9:45 am: Thanks for the site. I was planning to do something similar since the day twofifty.org is down.
Brawler 17 Sep 2009 9:50 pm: http://www.icheckmovies.com seems very nice. Though is missing those codes you could use anywhere with html-code to track your count, and last 5 seen IMDb Top250 movies… Even that, I hope you’ll like the site, it has more topics than Top250 ;)
Limeworld.com » Blog Archive » IMDB Top 250 6 Dec 2009 1:12 am (pingback): […] mere 95/250. My list: http://twofifty.org/user/Limegirl/ Update: twofifty.org is now defunct, but a clever fellow has launched something […]
Stijn 25 Nov 2012 2:28 pm: Just noticed the Facebook app no longer exists. So, I signed up for your alternate version. Let’s see what my score is… 106/250. Still a loooong way to go.
F 14 Aug 2015 2:11 pm: Hi, I really like the site but now i get a 404 when trying to access it. Is it permanently removed or just temporarily? If you don’t plan to put it up again would you be interested in open sourcing the source code so i can continue to use your handy tool? :)

Krugle

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Krugle is a code search engine.

Comments

sheikh 14 Dec 2006 3:08 pm: Thank you anand, It was very useful

Dr DivX is now open source

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Dr DivX is now open source. You may prefer it to Virtual Dub.

Folder Size

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Folder Size lets you see the size of folders in Windows Explorer.

code.google.com

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

code.google.com

Comments

ritzkini 24 Mar 2005 5:18 am: google rocks !!

46 freeware

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 12:00:00 +0000

The 46 best ever freeware utilities. What do you find useful?

Comments

Ashu 21 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: thats cool
m1109113562454 21 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: I use freemind too

Microsoft not opening more source code

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Why is Microsoft not opening more source code?

Apparently inappropriate code comments is one of the reasons according to this story. I wonder what kind of things developers put in comments that would be so bad for the rest of us to see?

Comments

sathish 10 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: checking if the contact name is coming properly..
Venkat 10 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: GMaP is cool! Better than mappy. Do we have something like this for India?

Terrorists use the Internet well

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 12:00:00 +0000

Terrorists use the Internet well.

W3C standards will be royalty free

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 12:00:00 +0000

W3C’s making the first concrete, organised, meaningful move against intellectual property over-protection. W3C standards will be royalty-free.

Open CD project

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Several cool Linux programs available on Windows via The Open CD project Celestia looked particularly interesting.

Compendium of multimedia projects on Linux

Fri, 22 Nov 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Compendium of multimedia projects via RobotWisdom