No need to say it out loud

13th February, and minutes away from the V-Day.

It is at this moment my reader that we choose to visit a boy who is preparing to send his first Valentines message - very much like several love struck teenagers at this time around the world I'm sure -well, atleast those who are in the same time zone as the boy in question...

But it is this boy we are watching now as he sits on his bed by the window in almost complete darkness. It is nearly new moon and the only light from the skies is what the stars in the heaven can provide (which is quite naturally, very little, if you've observed the sky on such a day my reader) The streets are empty and dark owing to the local power stations devious plan that seems to be that it's town's local lovers may be deterred by such darkness into keeping away from each other. Alas, they do not know that true love cannot be stopped by such menial things..

Let us approach the boy my reader, and hush... Make not any noise. Here we currently see that though it is completely dark, there is a little glow coming from his room. What is this source of light that has lit up his face thus? Ah, it is his mobile phone. Come now let us peep over his shoulder and see what the boy is upto...

He seems to be going through the Drafts section in Messaging option of his phone. Here we see several messages: shayari, wonderful poems, mushy rhymes he has collected all through the year. And they all bear the name of only one sender.. That is right my reader. The name in the sender field is that of the girl whom this boy loves deeply!! He seems to ponder over each message. One of these will end up in her inbox tonight he thinks, and we see/hear all this quite clearly...

You may wonder, my reader, why doesn't the boy call the girl up - for isn't that the best way to make his feelings known? Well the truth is that he is so sure if he tires to talk he will make a fool of himself and fail very badly. And neither me nor you can convince him otherwise, so lets leave it at that.

But even as I speak, we see/hear he has decided he cannot send any of those canned messages. They all seem to fake and unreal. Yes, he thinks, a true message must be from ones heart to another. So he starts composing a new message:

My dear ... Happy Valentines Day. I really love you a lot and

Hmm, he does not have much imagination at this sort of a thing, so my readers, we have to accept that this is what he starts with. Atleast this is some beginning...
But wait. He is shaking his head; Oh!! And now he is erasing the message

Happy

He cannot do it. He will not do it. Oh my, I think he is giving up. We can see/hear it in his head...

Happy Chinese New Year!

He writes instead. Poor boy...

May the year of the Tiger bring to you great prosperity !!

He concludes the message somewhat lamely and presses the Send button.Bitterly dissapointed he lies down to sleep. A few seconds pass by and he knows he isn't going to get any sleep tonight...

Somewhere nearby the town-halls huge clock begins its 12 chimes to indicate the arrival of midnight.

Dong.. Dong.. Dong..

Just then his phone beeps!!

Dong.. Dong..

1 new message

Dong.. Dong.. Dong.. Dong..

He opens his inbox. It is from her!!! His heart starts beating wildly. He opens the message:

Hey! Happy Valentines Day!                                                                                   Dong..
You don't need to say it out loud silly. I love you too.                                 Dong..
How about we meet someplace and spend our Valentine together?    Dong..


Come now dear readers, let us not press upon his privacy any more. Just as we leave his room we see him typing 'Y' and 'e' and ...

In which the author is plagiarised

Not so long ago, I wrote a stupid, silly post about how to tweet from java. And then as the Gunslinger said "the world moved on" I found better things to do (and also to do things in a better way), and wisely judging that if I ever wrote a Twitter app as mentioned in that post and made it public (which was something I wanted to for some time now) I may be sent to the gallows for such stupidity. Really, because it was a simple application that transmits your Twitter id & password in plain text, for all to sniff and snoop. For those of you who are interested you can use OAuth to keep your Twitter data safe. I'll perhaps write about that some other time..

So why am I returning to all that now? Well.. I stumbled upon this today. If you look carefully (or casually - for Christ's sake - it doesn't matter) you may notice similarities to the earlier post of mine. Some dude has flicked bits of my code for some project (called ESME) undergoing incubation at Apache Software Foundation!! Check out this part:

String encStatus = "status="+URLEncoder.encode(statusmsg, "UTF-8");
ostreamwriter = new OutputStreamWriter(conn.getOutputStream());
ostreamwriter.write(encStatus); //--> Magic Magic :)
ostreamwriter.flush(); //I forgot this at first..


Come on dude. It's okay if you're inspired by someone else's code. Feel free to contact that person if you want to use it. But copying it with comments and all ? Too obvious. How can you ripoff someone else's posts and pass it off as your own, huh? I'm not really interested in taking a legal recourse. But come on, isn't there something called ethics?

So now I make a hue and cry about not being credited and all that ? That my mother cried after seeing all this? What next, I participate in Aman ki Asha with my Pakistani counterpart (if I have one), block people on Twitter and write novels whose titles include only numbers I can count with my right hand?

My case may not be has high profile one as this. But hell, I now understand how people who get plagiarised by the likes of Pritam and all feel. I think I'm more than just a little peeved at this. I feel this urge to do something to make me feel better about this.

Allrighty.. What you see next is a product of one pissed off mind. You have been warned, so beware.

** Ironically the producers of a certain movie claimed that using this video is kind-of plagiarism, so this has been taken down **

In your face plagiarist. In your face..


Aah.. Feels much better now.