The Lost Bits

Scoop Behind Dot Bomb 2.0

2008-10-29T03:14:04Z

Here is a presentation that had me cracking in splits :-)) . Back since 2005 almost every web 2.0 startup had but one cliched statement to make :- "Google is making us an offer". And this VC company has the balls to tell the story as is. Highly recommended....

All Hands Meeting - Whiner Jerkins

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: rant spoof)

Happy Diwali 2008 !

2008-10-28T19:09:45Z

Wishing all the indian geeks and technology companies a very happy diwali. May this diwali bring all the success to your technlogy interests and business ventures, notwithstanding the economic downturn.

ALL YOUR CODE ARE BELONG TO US !

2008-10-24T07:41:14Z

Apparently google uses a tool called Mondrian developed by the creator of python for code reviews. This inspired the development of an open source web based code review tool, rietveld and its hosted on Google code projects. Compelling reason to try Google App Engine.

"In addition, I hope it will serve as a practical tool for the Python developer community, and hopefully for other open source communities. As I've learned over the last two years at Google, where I developed a similar tool named Mondrian, proper code review habits can really improve the quality of a code base, and good tools for code review will improve developers' life."
                             -----Guido van Rossum, Python creator and Google employee

~~Well~~ ~~Rietveld~~ ~~is based on Google App Engine and it can be hosted only on Google Servers ( Yuck !!).~~

Guido van Rossum was kind enough to correct me that there is a way to port Google Apps to pure Django. For those who still think its a lot of work ReviewBoard remains an alternative.

Interestingly why does google want  you to host your code on its servers , so that its easier for them to acquire you. They already have your source code !! and you cant fool them with your buzz words.

Walk2Web : Have Fun:

2008-09-29T03:04:14Z

Have fun walking your blog , your site, whatever ! .

Nuke Itunes - Switch to Winamp

2008-09-28T04:08:20Z

Itunes hogs resources. Period. The only compelling reason to use it is my ipod. Now winamp has a plugin for ipod. I still use winamp 2.xx because of its small size. For the ipod support alone , it could be worthwhile to upgrade to winamp 5. Coming to think of it winamp 5 is still a lot heavier than its 2.xxx but lighter than all the other music players.

Iterestingly there is Songbird which is developed of mozilla code base .IPod support other than on windows is a little broken. ~~But has a ton of features and going by Firefox should'nt kill your laptop.~~

Huh I was wrong. Check requirements.....Windows XP : 512 MB RAM , what the heck for ? Dump it.

A desktop App should use a plugin based architecture. Running basic app with bare minimum features should be cheap. If user wants to throw in the kitchen sink then his system deserves to be trashed. Coming to think of most of the apps developed today with the latest tools turn out heavy even if the app has nothing great to offer. And thats why VC 6.0 is still sweet, hell even GTK is lighter. Check out Reaper with all the works still comparatively light. Reaper screenshots : coolio.

Java gets fatter ?

2008-09-15T05:38:07Z

Over the years, I have been a parallel user of Visual Studio and JDK since its 1.1 days. But looking at the last couple of releases , Java seems to be accumulating more FAT at a faster rate than any other SDK. Java does not need to compete with rediculous language features with any other language. Its plus is portability and that's where the argument stops. and dont they say 'Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. '

Why the world needs another browser ?

2008-09-14T15:20:13Z

Here is a story from Google, on why the world needs another browser ?. I am not convinced nor are several other users like me , who find no reason convincing enough to dump Firefox. I did a few comparisons on loading / rendering times of a few web sites and sure chrome is just a little faster but not noticably to millions of average users. Apart from that I also found chrome to break at few sites which IE / FF rendered fine. The only thing for now chrome introduces, is the pain in the *!@ for developers who have to fix issues on chrome for apps they have already developed.

Meet Gurbaksh Chahal

2008-09-07T01:55:36Z

Gurbaksh Chahal is 25 , has'nt had a formal education , started out when he was 16 almost with nothing and is worth 340 million today. Every couple of years you hear a story that installs the beliefs that yes its possible your dreams can come true but only you have the Gumption and steel nerves to execute your thoughts in to action.

At 16 he realized what he want to do , dropped out of school and started ClickAgents, an advertising network focused on performance-based advertising. Two years later, on ClickAgents was sold for about 40 million.

His next venture in 2005 was called BlueLithium , which focussed on behavioural based advertising which he sold to Yahoo last year in an all cash deal for 300 Million. Along the way , he did also create 'MingleNow' a night-life focussed social networking site which yahoo shutdown after acquiring BlueLithium

"Financial rewards follow if you make the right decisions on where to exploit your passion and energy. Remember – just keep your ego at bay. Life’s all about execution, making the right choices, and focus…' -chahal

Programmers you dont want..

2008-06-23T07:12:50Z

Poisonous Programmers :- A nice read on the kind of programmers you DONT want on your project. Its also a nice one for people who want to earn themselves a reputation for being positive contributors to a project.

A nice snippet for people who dont have the time..

"No, wait...it's actually time to debug, rewrite, or redesign your system, and your priorities should be to proceed in that order - not the reverse, as so many cowboy programmers prefer. "Oh, the program froze again. Can we take two years, with a team of 10, to do this right?" No! Too often people decide that a bug is unfixable without a rewrite just because they enjoy writing new code more than they do fixing old code. Unfortunately, these are just the types of people who should not be writing code at all. "

--ACMQueue

Hello L.J, Welcome to Third Life.

2008-06-18T07:48:01Z

Its been a while .. about close to 18 months of 18 hrs a day, 7 days a week of sheer rush, excitement, energy, toil ,sweat and blood, living life bit by bit on the edge , working on one of the coolest stuff that has a chance of making history. With my dwindling role in my current project moving forward ,Its time to emerge out of the adventurous trance which kept me blinded to the world and kept me away from myself.

Hello L.J, I missed ya. It feels nice to be back. Being back to L.J is like being back to myself. This blog gets a third Life. More posts coming up.

VOIP is now 'Voice'

2007-02-24T14:59:15Z

...Need I say more.

The Pragmatic Programmer Vs The Passionate Programmer

2007-02-21T04:50:14Z

"And programmers, as I quote Larry Constantine in my book, programmers are programmers because they like to code — given a choice between learning someone else’s code and just sitting down and writing their own, they will always do the latter"

Programmers Dont Like To Code - As misleading as it may sound, Jonathan Rentzsch tries to explain what he means by the statement.

I posted this link at my work place to see what my colleagues thought and Raj Madhuram a colleague , a frequent contributor to Eclipse, flamed Rentzsch's view.

Makes up for an interesting read. ...And my opinion thus...

Coding is a form of problem solving. There are people who get gratification out of problem solving; the mode and means of doing it may be different. If a code did not solve a problem, I doubt if any body would want to code. Any piece of code is supposed to solve a problem.

Write assembly code if only need be or else use Python if it gets yours or someone else’s job faster. After all, software is for making people’s lives easier. The faster the better.

Programmers don’t value a language by means of its libraries. Programmers choose languages based on their capability to solve a particular problem faster, a lot of it depends upon the libraries it supports in most number of cases if not in all the cases.

A programmer’s valuation is important to another. Software is a team effort and with out respecting the valuation of another programmer the Open Source would not have been able to harness the power of hundred’s of talented programmers. No SIP, no Firefox, maybe no Eclipse

Programmers do code for the heck of it and will rewrite code for the fun of it. As long as it is not at the expense of somebody that’s great. The ACM for instance. This is important bring out great programmers and nurture talent

The P990i

2007-02-04T06:06:19Z

I have been pondering over a lot over the next phone I should buy. My last phone a Blackberry was a company given perk that I had to leave with the company since I switched to a new job.
Loved the blackberry , great value for money.

I acquired the p990i. Have it for over a month now and love it. The wifi works, the push and pop email works , great pictures , good sound , nice video capabilities. No complaints so far and yes I the like QWERTY keyboard and think its a plus. A slightly old model now, but still the best Smart phone , I could find.

SyncML comes of age

2006-11-26T02:33:24Z

Goosyc is a service that lets you sync your mobile with Google calendar. They have a long list of supporting devices.

TalkPlus Walks Its Talk !

2006-11-15T02:49:46Z

Talkplus walks its talk with a kewl demo. Way Cool
TalkPlus Demo : Call to echo123 from a mobile without a Skype client

"TalkPlus demo : Call to echo123 from a mobile without a Skype client" on Google Video

"The video is uncut, no editing at all, including about five seconds in the beginning of Jeff Black, TalkPlus CEO and founder, warming up. The call is from an unaltered mobile phone. You will see the Jeff send a text message and automatically download a Java program. That app shows his Skype address book, and he clicks on Skype's echo123 acount. For those who don't know it, echo123 is one of Skype's first test accounts. It doesn't have a SkypeIn number, so you couldn't fake access by dialing a PSTN number that forwards to echo123. TalkPlus doesn't have any access to Skype's private SIP gateways. So this demo shows that TalkPlus customers can dial any Skype user by their Skype name. It also shows that TalkPlus has engineered a server without Skype components that talks to the Skype network as if it were a Skype client using Skype's own language. It will scale to thousands of simultaneous sessions. TalkPlus has no plans to license this technology or turn it into a product. They built it to solve their customers' need to talk with millions of Skype users. Jeff demonstrates that Skype's protocols have been reverse engineered, and proven demand for a "headless" or "naked" Skype server."

AltME ! Secure your chat

2006-11-14T12:42:51Z

If you fear that your network is being spooked , here is an secure alternative to yahoo and MSN . AltME offers secure, persistent, private chat and a colloboration suite of applications to go along with it. All encrypted and 100% secure.

Flickr Vs Zooomr Vs Bubbleshare

2006-11-14T12:04:04Z

There are many many more photosharing web sites, but these three seem to be the most prominent ones. Flickr has the lions share of users and oh yes, it was acquired by yahoo. Ofcourse, We all know Flickr, dont we ?

Bubbleshare is rumored to be in phase of getting acquired. Bubbleshare provides the same fucntionaility as Flickr but it states 'simplicity' and 'ease of use' as the compelling reasons to its users. I happen to skim through their blog and found this one such feature that has simple usage:

"Easy upload your pictures via your Camera Phone :
1) Login to your account and go to the ‘My Account’ tab.

2) Scroll right to the bottom and click the button to generate your mobile access code. Note the email address you will use to send photos from your phone.

3) Take a snappy picture with your Camera Phone and send it to the email address you wrote down in step 2). Sorry each phone is slightly different so this step will be different on each phone.

That’s it! Email as many photos to the email address as you wish and they will be stored in your ‘My Albums’ list in an Album called ‘Mobile’"

Zooomr has an interesting background.Zooomr is a powerhouse when compared to both the above photosharing applications. It was written by 17 year old kristopher Tate and was termed 'Flickr on Steroids' when it came out. Zooomr also claims to be faster than Flickr. Here is a result of a speed test between the both.

Of course there is a fourth one , Riya which was supposed to be acquired by Google for 40 Million but did not happen as Google pulled out of the deal.Riya is not mainstream yet as they're still figuring what they are doing among so many other photo sharing sites, along with Google's Picasa.Both Picasa and Riya are in to photo recognition.

Though Bubbleshare is easier to use and Zooomr has some kick-ass features , Flickr would still be my choice. Simply because of its wide adoption. Its more likely that I will bump in to the pictures of my old ones,loved ones and lost ones at Flickr that at any other site; for now atleast.

Startup Pitches - the $$$$s are in the Details

2006-11-10T12:38:49Z

VC's are complaining about the 'lack of details' in startup pitches or rather the presentations startups put up in front of them are not convincing enough. Again usually what the VC's expect is your ability to convince people about a product people dont need. You as a startup founder and the VC's both know that the world does not need another web2.0 app. Venturewoods, has put two such case studies , that says the what-tos and what-not-tos about starup pitches.

#Case Study 1-TracBac
#Case Study 2-MirrorZen

Skype Vs Damaka

2006-11-09T12:58:52Z

Skype 3.0 is out with some new featues.

On the other hand I just stumbled upon Damaka ( the product sounds indian and its developed by an indian team ). Their product says that its a peer-to-peer ,SIP based, standards compliant VoIP phone. The VoIP phone party just got too crowded. With being peer-to-peer and yet being standards compliant , this is the only product that could be seen as a serious competition to Skype. But with Sip P2P drafts being in its early stages, I wonder how they'v managed to do SIP over p2p or either I understand it wrong.

They recently added an IPTV feature to their endpoint. "A Multiparty , Video Conferencing , IPTV feature". I'd sure like to check it out.

Startup recquires Stud !!! ??

2006-11-06T12:37:55Z

Stud Programmer, Programming God , King Programmer : are the typical terminologies one encounters during his/her colleges days; describing any descent programmer. Ironically, many startups today use the same vocabulary to specify their recquirements. Here are some samples.

"Hot startup is looking for angel members with the following qualities.
You can talk Java/C++/Python 15.99 hrs a day and your colleagues consider you a stud hacker. You can dig undaunted into the most formidable code with nerves of steel and hack another digg over the weekend."

Sounds more like a recquirement for a porn movie.

"Wanted some one for Chief Technology Officer . Must be a technologist at heart and stud in contributing to technology."

Clearly shows the 'fresh out of college' mindsets of the founders. So are you that Fundu, Stud Programmer ??

Talkplus. Talk Everywhere

2006-11-02T03:37:12Z

VoIP companies should learn from TalkPlus, that its not about cheap minutes , its about giving innovative and usefull applications.

TalkPlus launched its business around 2004 and has just received 5.5 million in funding. It recently launched a unique service for mobile phones.and here is how it works:

The service lets you download a tiny application on your mobile phone that provides the phone with a 'virtual number' . The service connects to a TalkPlus server over the data network, and allows you to authenticate your number. All out bound calls from your phone can be made via any of the two phone numbers you have – your cell phone, or this virtual number.

Outbound and inbound calls use the voice channel, and connect to the PSTN network. There is no voice quality degradation, typically a problem with mobile VoIP offerings. Those who are receiving your call can only see your virtual phone ID.

When they want to return your phone call, they can hit call and the call is returned to the virtual number. When they hit send, the call is then routed to the TalkPlus softswitch and then onto your mobile phone. The original cell phone number can stay anonymous, if you so desire, a feature that can come in handy if you are looking for love online or in the bars.

Back in the late 1990's , when VOIP mostly prevailed in 'RFC's' and 'White Papers', there were a few guys trying to figure out a business sense out of this and also had a few lame prototypes for downloads, with 'one-page' websites . Then ofcourse we had the 'dotcom bust', '9/11' and the telecom industry went through a bad phase. Those who kept hanging in there , are currently making their booty. Talkplus is one such company. Other such companies include eStara and Ubiquity and many more.Perseverance pays.

eStara's unique 'clicktocall' service allows users to make a VOIP call from a web page with no configuration recquired. Their http-tunneling mechanism can circumvent all firewalls and NATs. This is great service that companies could use to provide customer support on their web sites or even receive inbound sales calls.

Indian Search Engine gets 7 million

2006-10-31T10:11:10Z

Offlately there been a lot of surge in the Indian search engine space and No, they are not there to compete with google or yahoo , their existence is for a slightly different purpose. One such search engine is Guruji , which secured 7 million in funding from sequoia.

Google/Yahoo crawl the entire web and then categorize the content as Indian or not. It still retains the non-Indian content in its database and that content is included in Indian search results but gets lower priority. What Guruji does is in sharp contrast to Google’s approach. It discovers the content while crawling, stores only the India related content and throws out the irrelevant (non-Indian) data. This technique allows Guruji to crawl more, go deeper and hence index more India related data. Read on to learn about the others

Slideshare.net : youtube in a different avatar

2006-10-31T09:25:49Z

Slideshare is for powerpoint , what youtube is for videos. It lets you webify your powerpoint slides and also lets you link it or embed the whole slide in any web page in the form of a script as youtube would let you embed their videos. Slideshare might endup youtube's fate or otherwise - meaning WTF!! their UI looks like a direct copy of youtube..check it out

Feature wise they have plenty to catch up with. Example,I cant embed their slides in to my blog entry since Livejournal does not permit embedding scripts. This is however possible with youtube. The first thing they should be doing is link up with all the leading blog sites ( LJ, Wordpress blah blah) , as this would enable and therefore want millions of bloggers to webify their presentations.

Innovation wise , this is definately cool.

Starting up ? Start Now !!

2006-10-31T03:32:16Z

There is a lot of buzz happening in the startup scene. Everyone is buying domains , the VC's , enterpreneurs and that too at exorbidant prices. In a recent auction the following domains were sold.

Hell.com $1 Million (bid)
Sex.com $12 Million
Cameras.com $1.5 Million
sexeducation.com $120,000
For mobile companies there is a new extension called .mobi.

Here is an exerpt from venturewoods:
"VCs are everywhere! There are more VC firms in presence than aspiring entrepreneurs! This is of course great news for the local startup scene. VCs are lamenting on lack of quality entrpreneurship." So its now that this country can grow out of the outsourcing culture to startup culture. If you have that GREAT idea, its time to put it work before the party is over.

Quick execution is really the key to the success of a great idea.

So for the aspring enterpreneur, here are some tips:

Mobile and consumer internet remain dominant ares of interest in both VC and startup circles. Web 2.0 and KPO are the latest buzzwords. VOIP too is a buzz word but at least locally there is some time before it becomes mainstream.

YouTube : Concept to $$$$$

2006-10-30T11:16:47Z

Jawed Karim , one of the three founders of YouTube gives an account of his super fast, super successfull startup. They put the idea on paper on Febuary 2005 , April they release the product and the following year thats now October 2006 , they sell it for 1.65 billion.