Author Archives: Rohit Mishra

I am a Computer Science Engineering student at VIT. Worship Technology , support open-source, new media. Follow politics, cricket and F1. Working on my first product. I manage social media for my university.

Why viral invite systems suck

There is a growing trend for websites to ask us to invite our friends and followers to their web app, so that we can be bumped ahead in their early access queue. It is called the viral-invite system, which was probably started by Forkly. Heck, Launchrock built a startup out of this idea. I am …

February 17, 2012 – 10:41 pm | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in Startups | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Indian Air Force finally goes for Dassault Rafale

After a 11 year long bidding process, the Indian Air Force has decided to award the contract for 126 Medium Multi-Range Fighter Aircraft to Dassault Aviation for Rafale. Defence purchases in India have a murky history, and one expects that this deal has been made in the best interests of the country and the brave …

January 31, 2012 – 11:48 pm | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in India | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Jobs on iTunes for Android

We thought about whether we should do a music client for android. We put iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods. But I don’t see an advantage of putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I don’t want to make Android users happy. Steve Jobs in his …

January 16, 2012 – 11:39 pm | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Laptop buying advice for web and mobile hackers

There is a post on the 37Signals blog saying how the choice of operating system doesn’t matter much for a hacker. Unless you have another machine for you, I don’t agree to this. I am currently developing on Linux and looking to switch to a Mac. Linux is a great environment to hack but the …

January 11, 2012 – 12:46 am | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in Hacking | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Think Different

I am currently reading Steve Jobs – by Walter Issacson and came upon the making of this ad. It is easy to identify with this ad today knowing all that Steve did to transform so many things, but, to think of it at a time when Apple was in a horrible shape and had its …

January 6, 2012 – 8:27 pm | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in Everything Else | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

iCloud ads don’t make sense in India !

India is one of the few countries where Android tablets are doing well (Android tabs suck because of lack of apps though.) . Also, because the Indian market is so price-conscious, I doubt we have huge sales of iMacs and Macbook laptops here.  So, it is confusing why would Apple push iCloud so heavily in India then. …

December 19, 2011 – 12:15 am | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in Everything Else | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Installing Android SDK on Ubuntu 11.10

The first step in installing the Android SDK is installing the Sun (Oracle) JDK. Java 7 is out now, but I will stick with the recommended Java 6. Sun JDK is not available in the Ubuntu repositories, so you need to install it using this method. Open Ubuntu Software Center, using the Super (Windows) Key …

December 16, 2011 – 3:07 am | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in Hacking | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

Will UID project see the light of the day ?

One of my favorite day-dreaming topics was a project that will assign every India a unique identity number. I believed (and still believe) that such a project would go a long way in improving the implementation of government schemes and improving national security. So, I was elated when Nandan Nilekani joined the present government to …

October 9, 2011 – 6:19 am | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in India | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

Android is not free courtesy Microsoft

  ZDNet is reporting that Microsoft has signed a patent licensing agreement with Samsung for the latter’s Android phones and tablets. As hard as it is to accept, this has proven Steve Ballmer right where he said that “Android is not free. It comes with a patent cost”.  Samsung is not the first to sign …

September 28, 2011 – 8:19 pm | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in Tech | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

VIT University is now on Google Calendar

As the number of student events and alumni meetings keep increasing, it is no longer viable to share all the posts on VIT’s facebook page without spamming the news feed of people who like the page. So, we have decided to share all the events using Google Calendar. You can subscribe to the VIT calendar by …

September 22, 2011 – 8:37 pm | By Rohit Mishra | Posted in Personal | Tagged | Comments (1)