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.