Me Inc.

Poker and Business

2011-12-24T21:18:00.000-08:00

I am currently reading "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh which is an autobiographical account of his journey of entrepreneurship through LinkExchange and Zappos.

In section 1 of the book there ia an excerpt where Tony mentions how he got attracted to Poker, post LinkExchange sale to Microsoft for $265m (which got him ~ $35m). In this

excerpt, he lists down the similarities between poker and business. I'm putting down part of it here:

Evaluating Marketing Opportunities:

- Table Selection is the most important decision you can make
- It's okay to switch tables if you discover it's too hard to win at your table
- If there are too many competitors, even if you are the best it's lot harder to win.

Marketing and Branding:

- Act weak when strong. Act strong when weak.
- Your "brand" is important.

Financials:

- Always be prepared for the worst possible scenario.
- The guy who wins the most hands is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run.
- The guy who never loses a hand is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run.
- Make sure your bankroll is large enough for the game you're playing and the risks you are taking (exposure)
- Play only with what you can afford to lose.
- Remember that it's a long term game. You will win or lose individual hands or sessions but it's what happens in the long terms that matters.

Strategy:

- Don't play games that you don't understand even if you see lots of other people making money from them.
- Figure out the game when the stakes aren't high.
- Don't cheat. Cheaters never win.
- Be flexible.
- Be patient and think long term.
- The players with most stamina and focus usually win.
- Differentiate yourself.
- Hope is not a good plan.

Continual Learning:

- Educate yourself. Read books.
- Learn by doing.
- Don't be afraid to ask for advice.

Culture:

- You gotta love the game. Live it. Sleep it.
- Don't be cocky. Don't be flashy. There's always someone better than you.
- Be nice and make friends.
- Share what you've learned with others.
- Look for opportunities beyond the game that you play.
- Have fun.

Tony Hsieh is my new hero, not because he has been successful - Heroes are heroes because of their heroic behavior not because they succeeded or failed, but because of tremendous insight he has developed into business and life.

Anatomy of a killer online retail outlet - A talk by Paras Chopra

2011-04-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

I attended Triggr last weekend at Instamedia (Sector 65, Noida). It was an event organized to congregate web startups. Experience was much better than Barcamp (I still need to analyze what went better!)

This post is basically a summary of the talk by Paras Chopra (based on notes so expect rephrased text).

There are basically three kinds of users who visit your online shop. These are:

Buyers This segment of users has come to buy either directly or by reference and is here to do some shopping. You don't really need to 'worry' about them. They will buy!
Researchers This guy comes to the shop to find out the experience, product details, pricing etc. and is likely to compare with other sites. You have to make this guy happy to get him buy from your shop!
Window Shoppers Well, this segment is "wow.. what a beautiful arrangement!" kind who is not really here to buy. These will visit the site and roam around but not buy.

Following are some important points to keep in mind -

Ignore Window Shoppers
Optimize the website for Researchers and convert him to buyer.
Make it easy for buyer to buy
Single call to action

Have a single call to action on a page. If user gets confused on your page whether he wants to 'add to cart' or 'sign up' or 'free email letter' then he may hit the biggest enemy i.e. Back button.

Joomla is bad example.
Wordpress is good example.
Reduce text on the page
Headlines matter more than you realize People look at the 'top' of the page to know what you do (or offer).

- Write something concrete (No 'Welcome to Bob's Site)
- Headline is not a place to make a pitch
- Keep it short (not more than eighty words)

Odesk is bad example.
Elance is good example.
Use social proofs to remove uncertainties or doubts Testimonials. Who is using? Who are your partner sites?
If you don't have social proofs -

- Give products for free to get the testimonials
- Reach out to experts and get feedback
- Cite some theoretical or industry research e.g. 'this increases productivity by 50%'
- No. of unique visitors on this page till date

Twhirl - bad example
Hootsuite - good example
Design Matters! Invest in high design. High ROI.
Ignore everything above. Use A/B Testing!

Use two versions of your site to decide about the better approach of the two you are confused with - use pilot runs and let the users decide. Sometimes you will be shocked to see that many theories fail.
Use Google Web Optimizer (free) or Visual Website Optimizer (paid $49 p. m.) - this is Paras Chopra's startup or enterprise solutions like Omniture, Webtrends (cost like crazzy $xxx,x... p. m.)

Book Review: How to make a million before lunch

2011-04-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

For a long time I've not been blogging actively and also not been reading actively. Reasons lie in myriads of reasons that include work and home and social commitments (this is better term for all the time I killed gossiping with friends).

Few days back I was roaming around in Atta market (Sec 18, Noida) and noticed a new book store Pages (in the same row as Galgotia's book store). Me, a total book lover (I don't even check whether I've money to buy the books or not - My wife has taken my credit card for this reason - its bill was mostly full of books.. this time I'd money btw) went inside the store. This book by Rachel Bridge caught my attention for obvious reasons. Millions! before lunch! Wow!!

I purchased the book and started reading it - at home, on the way to office (a tea shop I chose for this) and while returning back from office. Finally, I could finish it after two weeks or so.

Book is mostly from a services perspective but I don't think that there is no wisdom for products. Rachel emphasizes that you should use all shortcuts to reach where you want to it (and it's a no bullshit guide so all these shortcuts still make journey not that short). Following are few things that I took from the book -

Do some thing you really understand If you want to do it faster then you have to do something where you already have the knowledge. You cannot spend time learning.
You don't really need to invent or innovate for your first business This is key to Rachel's book and she emphasizes a lot with a huge list of examples of been there done that entrepreneurs who did not really innovate - just solved the problem a little better.
Do you market research make sure that there is a gap (demand for your product or service)
Embrace e-commerce Ditch the shop and use the internet as marketplace.
Laugh in the face of bank loans Get stuff for free (Use open source). Ask family. Friends. Hire with equity rather than cash but avoid venture capital till you think the scale time has come.
Cherish you (Net) Profit Net profit is all that matters. As she puts

Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.
Get out there and promote yourself
Love (most) of your customers You have to understand that there will be customers who are P.I.T.A. and you should identify and stop being very nice to them since they hinder in serving other customers.

More than the topics discussed I loved the book for its fun quotient and the examples. She makes it a point to make you understand that there really are many businesses selling for a million dollars.. err.. million pounds. Most examples in the book are UK based businesses.

Loved the reading.

Facebook Bug!

2011-03-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

Facebook bug: I like something and a post with 0 likes tells me "You and 2 others like this".. click on "2 others" and it shows only me. I thought this is happening due to simultaneous likes but no.. bug! reproducible too! Hmm.

One of the little things that I love about Google!

2011-03-13T23:58:00.000-07:00

First Speaking Indian feature film - Alam Ara!

Floshowers

2011-01-16T03:14:00.000-08:00

Floshowers is an online gifting portal for buying flowers & gifts for your loved ones. Though there are numerous sites in the business but a superior web experience, wide range of choices, loyalty points scheme and personalized service put floshowers in an altogether different league.

A major differentiation from other businesses in this arena (it is quite crowded) is Floshowers' Loyalty Rewards Program. You earn 10 points for every Rs. 100/- that is spent in the orders and these are redeemable as discounts in chunks of 200 points (1 point = Rs. 1). Quite a deal!

Another beautiful thing that is worth a mention is their support to Godparents.in. Floshowers will donate a part of their revenues to Godparents. Godparents is an non-profit working towards the upliftment of deprived children in India.

They have services across the country in around 30 cities. They also have midnight delivery option in a huge subset of the cities they provide services in.

Floshowers is also present on Facebook and you can "like" them for updates on offers, discounts and lots of fun stuff.

_

Browsershots

2010-12-28T06:56:00.000-08:00

Ever got into this? After making changes in your website and testing and making sure that it looks so beautiful on your chrome (by Google) or Firefox (by Mozilla), you call up a friend just to hear that he sees everything broken - layout, frames and many other things messed up. You yell! and then ask "but it's working here.." (developers are so used to use this line) and then you relax when you find that your friend is using the browser by one of world's best(?) software companies - the Internet Explorer.. You relax for a while until you check that IE still is the most popular and most used Internet browser.

And if you are even slightly like me then you will also worry about so many other browsers you don't have on your system but you want to support. Here is some great (and free) help -

One easy way to check to see what your website looks like on different browsers is to go to a website called Browsershots. There you can enter in your website address and then you’ll get screenshots of your website in different web browsers. It’s a free service and you can check it out at: http://www.browsershots.org

Doing it Alone

2010-09-08T08:53:00.001-07:00

"If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone."
- Steve Wozniak

As far as I remember I was never given such advice by anyone, be it my parents, my teachers, professors or mentors during my professional career. It's hard to understand and harder to believe some such thing when no one talked about it in such a large span (I am past quarter of my life span). But when I, for last few weeks, started to devote some time to this idea of working alone I could clearly think the cases where it was a pure win. These are the cases of "diffused responsibility", "too much dependence" and "plain pretence".

I remember working with a group in my last company where each of us in the group felt that the given system of diagnosing the issues was substandard and needed an overhaul. "We" were asked to do that task of making the diagnosis tool better but since it was "We" and apart from this work, everyone had there own set of tasks in their plate - it never happened. It happened when one of us took the responsibility of doing so (after being pointed to sadly). Everyone knew someone has to do it but did not take the task because they assumed that if it is important then someone will take care of it otherwise it's not that important. I should also point out that everyone was competent enough to do the task. This was the case of "Diffused Responsibility".

In my current work, for quite some time I was having a task of automating a stuff which was causing pain to us - a very very repetitive stuff which should have been automated long back (I believe this, being part of an engineering company, other companies - I am quite sure - look up to). I promised that I'll do the task but then came a phase of planning - how to do it? (On this question I imagine the face and style of a a very senior hardcore geek I worked with in a previous company yelling at me - "stupid, how do you write scripts?"). Well, trust me I was asked to plan it out, I was asked to meet so that we use the same automation system which a larger activity uses. So there comes the whole gimmick of breaking the tasks in such a way that there are multiple tasks available with multiple people and yes, there must be a dependency so that there is one more guy involved who will look at getting it done. Hmm. Too much work at hand. The tasks planned moved but very slowly. Thanks to a guy in my team who "broke" the rule and deployed the simple script. That was the power of doing it alone. All the friction was gone from the same set of guys talking about planning and "N" factors to be taken in account. This was the case of "too much dependence". If you get into such case, do the same - break the rule.

I also remember another incident that happened to me recently. I was working on a killer feature (a killer feature is not a feature that kills but a feature which is most talked about in your product) of the software product I work on as part of my day job. It was a team of three and we decided on few things. Then all of a sudden scope of the work to be done due to some reasons was decreased. We still thought it would be good to decide on few investigations just for Intellectual Property reasons. Here the third case of "Plain Pretence" came in. I did not do, I am pretty sure, because I thought someday I would sit with other guys and work on it. That did not happen. I am also sure that had I started working on these investigations alone, someone in my team would have joined for sure - these are guys who are undoubtedly competent and have keen interest in software development. That initiation was the key.

I've written only about the work life experiences but I think this applies to many non work experiences. For me most of the things that I started without worrying about whether someone will join in or not were marked done at some point of time - either successfully or unsuccessfully. They were not lying in on my table under the _was_not_able_to_even_try_ folder. So I have started believing in starting alone. That should not be interpreted as "don't do in a group" but as - if it is possible to do it alone then don't wait for the group to begin - just begin and the group may join.

Larger dreams in life like starting a company, I've been told should not be done alone. They are such goals which require some one to be there to take care of each other in adverse situations and more reasons. Imagining this, I agree but since I am yet to taste actually that sweet feeling of starting an enterprise I won't be able to comment on this but I feel this small piece of gyan will be helpful in lot of smaller activities in day to day life.

A random post on a random thought.

Come to the edge

2010-04-22T22:06:00.000-07:00

Came across this beautiful poem while reading a book by Felix Dennis:

"Come to the edge."
"We can't. We're afraid."
"Come to the edge."
"We can't. We will fall!"
"COME TO THE EDGE."
And they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew.

~ Christopher Logue (b. 1926)

On 'Atithi, Tum kab jaoge?'

2010-03-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

Atithi, Tum Kab Jaoge is nice to watch movie and takes you to that genre of Hrishikesh Mukherjee when movies were made around the common man. There were no can-do-it-all heroes and no can-bare-it-all heroines. Movies were based on simple things happening in day to day life and a story was woven around them. Golmaal (1979) is the first movie that comes to my memory and Amol Palekar is the first face that comes to mind although Chupke Chupke (1975), Chhoti Si Baat (1975) belong to same category.

Well, 'Atithi, ...' is a satire on 'Atithi', a hindi word meaning 'guest'. In India guests are (meant to be) considered God - the roots are mythological but it has become part of culture. I have been brought up in a middle class family in a small city where life is considerably slow when you compare it with life in metros. In such environment it is highly likely to observe such demeanour for guests. It was possible then. It is not possible much now. The reason is there is quite a shift in living. While earlier there were joint families so 'Atithi' who can arrive any time (Atithi breaks into 'A' + 'Tithi' that means 'No Date') were able to get someone to take care of them. How is that possible in a nuclear setup where both husband and wife are working and come back only at eight in the evening? Tough!

Movie is a good laugh with wonderful performance as "Chacha ji" by Paresh Rawal (Love him for most of his performances!) and Konkana Sen (very natural as a housewife). Ajay Devgan did well but overplays the character towards the end.

Positive about 'Atithi, ...': Towards the end of the movie it starts showing , in a subtle manner, the problems which have grown only because of the cultural shift taking place. As a friend of mine commented on a social networking site: "You can make contacts on a social networking site, not relations.". In the race towards 'self centered life' we have stopped saying 'hello' to our neighbours, sometimes we know people in our societies by their flat numbers (a funny incident happened at my reception when I guy in my apartments introduced himself and his wife as 'we are from 8C'.. hmm), we hardly know the bank officer of any of our banks since we don't think we need to (this is a scene in the movie itself).. ! I strongly believe that we do need to know. Fact of the life that cannot be changed is that humans are social animals. I have observed that people are happier if they have a relationship with colleagues beyond office. Apart from all the gyan, movie is a fun watch and gyan too is subtle so if you want to ignore you will not even be able to catch it.

Music is nice. I loved the famouse "Suhani Raat..." and its videography. Amazing. I loved "Dohe by Kabir" too and the score "Deva kab aaoge..".

I give it three stars (out of five)!

Do addresses tell something about the 'great' companies?

2010-02-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

Apple

1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
408.996.1010

Microsoft Corporation

One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
USA

DeskTwitter 2.0 gets "100% FREE" Award by Softpedia

2010-01-18T01:32:00.001-08:00

Just came to know that DeskTwitter 2.0 received "100% FREE" Award by Softpedia. Following is a badge which can be used to download Desktwitter.

New Year Resolution

2010-01-03T23:43:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader, Happy New Year!

New year is a time when you get another opportunity to give up the old and get on to new, a time to improvize, a time to promise, a time to resolve.. ! so here is my list of resolutions for this time.. !!

From an older post on this blog: (with modifications in italics)
___________________________________________________

A list of resolutions by Donald Latumahina was published in the newspaper today. I would like to pick the following:

Be observant. (Be more present in the present.)
Never let any idea go uncaptured. (Give a thought on ideas. Write them when they come.)
Try to learn something from the people I meet. (Trust me, Lots of knowledge out there.)
Take a book or magazine wherever I go. (This is something I need to start again. It makes me feel good as I always have 'a-good-thing-to-pursue' if I find time.)
Allocate a minimum of 30 minutes to read a book.
Meditate. (I hope I will try it this year!)
Take time to reflect on your day. What have you done right? What have you done wrong? What can you do to improve yourself?
Drink water a lot. (Apart from health, it affects your thoughts and keeps you cool.)
Exercise (regularly). (Get that tummy off you.)
Take notes of every expense you make. (Hmm. Lets give it a try one more time..)
Do something for the first time. (Yep!)
Effectively read online articles. (Organize bloglines, Use Google Reader, Use Delicious!)
Learn to use a tool, either to improve your skill with a familiar tool or to learn a new tool.
Take your time to review your life goals.
Rise early. (Hmm. Lets give it a try one more time..)
Listen to educational and motivational audio programme when you are doing activities which do not need your full concentration.
Be grateful for your day.
Read a random article to expose you to new things.
Be Happy. Have fun. Be passionate about life!

Photo: more by him on Flickr

I will sincerely try these this time!

Movie Review: 3 Idiots

2009-12-25T09:24:00.000-08:00

Loosely woven around the popular novel "Five Point Someone" by Chetan Bhagat, 3 Idiots is a story which revolves around three characters - Rancho, Raju and Farhan who are engineering students at a premiere engineering institute of India (ICE in moview, IIT in the book) and story moves around their friendship, Rancho's thoughts about the basic flaws in the system due to which no innovation is coming up and due to which an unnecessary pressure is being built up - which hampers the original thinking, their passions and several events that happen in their lives and campus.

A must watch if you have not read the novel. It should be a good watch for even those who have read the book.

I liked most the song and punchline: All Izz Well!

Subvert the paradigm

2009-12-15T04:02:00.000-08:00

Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/v/adLxTDJgXUw

I loved the background score too.

Do not stand at my grave and weep!

2009-11-11T04:38:00.000-08:00

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I do not die.

A poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye.

Success

2009-11-05T00:27:00.000-08:00

To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived!
This is to have succeeded.

-A beautiful poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Via Roshan. Thanks for Sharing.

Appreciating Your Immediate World

2009-09-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

An interesting social experiment result: must read it.
_

Maturity.. Some thoughts!

2009-09-28T23:24:00.000-07:00

Notes put down August, 2008

Through out, last week I was more-than-more busy with my work and hence could flip only a few pages of the book I am reading currently 'A Beautiful Mind' by Sylvia Nasar which is basically the biography of John Nash, mathematician less known for the Noble Prize in Economics and his contributions in the development of "Game Theory" and more for the movie based on him with the book's name. A passage in the book stuck with me --

".. At nineteen, Nash already had the style of a mature mathematician... He tried to reduce things to something tangible. He tried to relate things to what he already knew. He tried to get a feel of things before he actually tried them. He tried to do little things with some numbers in it. That's how Ramanujan, who
claimed he got his results from spirits, figured things out.."

There's absolutely nothing extraordinary in this passage (book has more extraordinary things about Nash and other mathematicians at Princeton and elsewhere). It hit the chords in my cortex because it enumerates few properties of maturity. This was a question in my mind at different phases of my life till now. How do we know if we are getting mature? One of the senior colleagues in the first company I worked for said once ".. when you start learning from past mistakes and avoid repetition of those mistakes, you know that you're getting mature...". I think maturity also means understanding that however long journey be, it has to start with a step ahead. It also means that however big a task is, it has to start with an initiative (which might not be that glamerous -- in most cases "will" not be). It also means that writing of that brilliant piece of software began with few initial keystrokes. As of writing this, I am begining with a protypical implementation I need to do as part of my job.. first step.. hmm!

Now when I write software (that's the job into which I am for quite some time), I am more in resonance with understanding the requirements and more at ease transforming the requirements into small doable items and then building on top of it. This comes with a risk though. If you don't have your idioms, learnings, standards ready with you, you may find yourself saying "this is all crap" by the time you finish up with the project (Belive me, this has happened with me several times and my friends still grill me for that behavior of mine).

Don't just write software, learn from it and keep maintaining the learnings (may be document them somewhere, and keep revising the patterns).. In the mood of generalization, I would say that don't just do things, learn from what you do and keep the learnings (and for self gratification, keep looking back and you will feel the difference..)

Wikipedia says that Maturity is: a term used in psychology to indicate that a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate manner; often this implies a response that is reasoned or learned rather than impulsive.

while another resource defines it in a more verbose manner:

What is maturity? Maturity is the ability to control anger and settle differences without violence or destruction. Maturity is patience. It is the willingness to pass up immediate pleasure in favor of the long-term gain. Maturity is perseverance, the ability to sweat out a project or a situation in spite of heavy opposition and discouraging set-backs. Maturity is the capacity to face
unpleasantness and frustration, discomfort and defeat, without complaint or collapse. Maturity is humility. It is being big
enough to say, "I was wrong." And, when right, the mature person need not experience the satisfaction of saying, "I told you so." Maturity is the ability to make a decision and stand by it. The immature spend their lives exploring endless possibilities; then they do nothing. Maturity is the art of living in peace with that which we cannot change, the courage to change that which should be changed -- and the wisdom to know the difference.

So I would say that maturity is signified by following attributes (not comprehensive obviously, so these are just few of them) -

1. You don't react. You 'act' instead.
2. You are not impulsive.
3. You gradually keep moving towards a more stoic behavior. You take both good and bad news in cool manner.
4. While doing your tasks, you keep in mind that failure is "possible" and keep your fallbacks ready. You think of them even when "it is not required" as told by your colleagues.
5. You gracefully say "it was my mistake" if it was. You also tell people if they are wrong and at the same time listen to their point.
6. You keep your words.
7. You don't blabber and talk sense. Words should come out of mouth (especially when people are listening to you) only after substantial thoughts.
9. You keep learning and try not to repeat mistakes.
10. You are assertive in your profession and personal life.
11. You listen to others.
12. You are not judgemental.

There is a saying which struck me - "Win as if you are so used to it and lose as if you enjoyed losing for a change". (A picture of Pete Sampras flashes when I write this).

What do you think about Maturity?

Age & Entrepreneurship!

2009-09-23T10:56:00.000-07:00

Via Paul Kedrosky's Blog:

"Today, however, there is a new report out from my friends at the Kauffman Foundation on precisely this question: The age (and education) of U.S. tech entrepreneurs. What is the distribution? How is it changing?

Perhaps surprisingly, the report shows that U.S. tech entrepreneurs are, if anything, older than expected. People founding tech companies over the last ten years had an average and median age of 39-years, nowhere near the age that makes for good stories about dorm room entrepreneurs -- and older than many of us might have thought."

Asciify v0.0.2

2009-09-08T03:57:00.000-07:00

Asciify v0.0.2 is an AIR application which produces ASCII arts for images and requires Adobe AIR runtime installed on the system. It has been tested (unit tested I should say rather) on Windows XP SP2 and Windows 7 but *should* run on other flavors as well.

Asciify v 0.0.2 is out with following features:

* Colored "Asciification": Draw the character in the RGB color of the corresponding pixels.
* Option to invert the background and foreground colors: This is because black background makes the apparent inter-character distance lesser (increased proximity) and hence looks more appealing with colored character set. It looks worse without colored pixels though.
* Brightness change control: This will help in recalculation of pixel characters.

Known Issue:

* Performance really needs a revamp. A huge one. Do not close the application when you notice a "Not Responding" message on title bar. It will be back in few seconds. I am working on the performance but could not wait to release this.

Download Asciify v0.0.2 here.

As they say a picture is worth more than a thousand words, following is a snapshot of help showing major feature components in this release: [click on the photo for reading it out]

[From earlier post]

Why would you want to install this over a large number of websites doing it?
* Uploading the image to server and rendering it back to the browser. Hmm.
Why run back n forth when that does not add value? ASCIIfy will save
time!
* You don’t want to “not being able to create ASCII Art” when somehow
you are not connected to internet. ASCIIfy is so much more available.
* You can save it in so many formats other than text!

ASCIIfy v0.0.1

2009-08-08T04:43:00.000-07:00

ASCIIfy v0.0.1 is an AIR application which produces ASCII arts for images (currently only JPEGs considering its version 0.0.1 and my temptation to roll it out early). Asciify v0.0.1 requires Adobe AIR runtime installed on the system. It has been tested (unit tested I should say rather) on Windows XP SP2 but *should* run on other flavors as well. Attributing to Adobe AIR it *should* also run on Linux systems. I’ll update this post with my tests on Ubuntu 8.10 soon.

Following is a sample image created using ASCIIfy:

Original image:

Features:

Convert an Image into ASCII Art and render the ASCII art in an editable text viewer.
Save ASCIIfied image as JPEG, PNG, Adobe PDF or HTML.
Get an approximate Histogram of the image.

Written using: Flex 3, Flex Builder.

Runtime: Adobe AIR.

Third party: For saving the ASCII Art as Adobe PDF, this uses Alive PDF library [http://alivepdf.bytearray.org/].

Internet is flooded with a number of software which do this but I believe this is one of the first attempts which use power of AIR to bring this experience to desktop while keeping the RIAness of Flex.

Why would you want to install this over a large number of websites doing it?

Uploading the image to server and rendering it back to the browser. Hmm. Why run back n forth when that does not add value? ASCIIfy v0.0.1 will save time!
You don’t want to “not being able to create ASCII Art” when somehow you are not connected to internet. ASCIIfy v0.0.1 is so much more available.
You can save it in so many formats other than text!

Where to download it from?

Download Asciify v0.0.1

Happy ASCIIfying!

… And do provide your valuable feedback here or at awasthi dot manoj at gmail dot com.

Monty Hall Problem!

2009-06-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

Monty Hall Problem is named after the host of an american game show with the name "Let's make a deal". Problem has many variants. One of them is:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Should the player switch? That's the problem.

I tried this. There are 3 doors. 1 of them contains cars and hence probability of choosing a door with car is 1/3 and that with goat is 2/3. When one of the door with goat is opened then the question reduces to two doors. So probability should be 1/2 now and it should not matter whether you switch or not. But it does and that's why it has been most discussed paradox problem. From Wikipedia entry -

Because there is no way for the player to know which of the two remaining unopened doors is the winning door, most people assume that each of these doors has an equal probability and conclude that switching does not matter. In fact, the player should switch—doing so doubles the probability of winning the car from 1/3 to 2/3.

Why the probability is not 1/2?

This difference can be demonstrated by contrasting the original problem with a variation that appeared in vos Savant's column in November 2006. In this version, Monty Hall forgets which door hides the car. He opens one of the doors at random and is relieved when a goat is revealed. Asked whether the contestant should switch, vos Savant correctly replied, "If the host is clueless, it makes no difference whether you stay or switch. If he knows, switch" (vos Savant, 2006).

Increasing the number of doors

It may be easier to appreciate the solution by considering the same problem with 1,000,000 doors instead of just three (vos Savant 1990). In this case there are 999,999 doors with goats behind them and one door with a prize. The player picks a door. The game host then opens 999,998 of the other doors revealing 999,998 goats—imagine the host starting with the first door and going down a line of 1,000,000 doors, opening each one, skipping over only the player's door and one other door. The host then offers the player the chance to switch to the only other unopened door. On average, in 999,999 out of 1,000,000 times the other door will contain the prize, as 999,999 out of 1,000,000 times the player first picked a door with a goat. A rational player should switch. Intuitively speaking, the player should ask how likely is it, that given a million doors, he or she managed to pick the right one.

from coding horror blog -

When told of this (that switching was more lucrative choice), Paul Erdos, one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th century, said, "That's impossible." Then, when presented with a formal mathematical proof of the correct answer, he still didn't believe it and grew angry. Only after a colleague arranged for a computer simulation in which Erdos watched hundreds of trials that came out 2-to-1 in favor of switching did Erdos concede that he was wrong.

The problem is so unintuitive one of the most notable mathematicians of the last century couldn't wrap his head around it. That's ... well, that's amazing.

Sunday evening went well with this problem!

customer service, an experience

2009-06-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

Recently I had few experiences of bad customer service with a telecom company Reliance communications which is a huge company. Few days back I again had a bad experience with the same company. In all instances, I visited a reliance web world store in Sector 18, Noida and experience was one of indifference to the customer and customer was me. In latest experience, I went for a disconnection and wished to know the amount I needed to pay. Executives kept me moving from one person to another and then said that some server is not working and hence I need to come again some other day. The words "come again" were a dej-vu experience. Same words were said when I earlier came to reliance for a connection, when I came for a broadband disconnection and for a query (then too there was a server issue - called "technical problem" - which seemingly is a NP-hard problem for reliance meaning no solution exists in finite time.

First experience was an amazing one - I went to reliance for a connection with few documents which I thought are required and was told to get x, y, z documents required and "come again". I went with the documents x, y, and z after 2-3 days. I was told that just that day they had a letter from head office which says that document 'z' will not work and instead a document 'p' is required and hence I had to "come again" with document 'p'. I was frustrated, irritated and showed my anger to the employees - but they behaved as government employees. Smiled. Said "sir, ab yeh to rules hain company ke. hum thode hi banaate hain." (Sir these are company rules, we don't make them). Well, I went with that document and got the connection. Last experience that I wrote above about was the disconnection of this connection.

By chance, I also had to visit vodafone store for paying my bill. I went to the vodafone store which is ironically, located just beside the reliance web world. Their system of paying bills is automated with three machines set up. Still, it had a guard and two service executives. These executives looked more like dumb bimbos but well, they were there for any help with the process of paying bills. They were also there to give you a privilege card with a smile which vodafone was giving you as an appreciation of paying bill. That's what customer service is about.

I remember when I went for a connection and their corporate plan for the company I work for was over - I showed disinterest without that plan - and how that guy jumped in, talked to his superiors and within seconds got me registered as the vodafone customer. He asked me to get a few documents ready which vodafone will get collected from my office. That's what customer service is about.

Trust me, reliance executives would not have cared. I know from my experience.

All in all, I want to say that cheaper is not going to get you the market Mr Ambani. In this business customer satisfaction is going to take an edge and that comes more from the quality of service than being cheaper.

So Mr Anil Dhirubhai Ambani, Listening?

Long long ago..

2009-06-12T08:28:00.001-07:00

I used to write blogs and used to love it. I got stuck with lot of work at office, home and elsewhere. Lots of it, believe me. Now everything subsiding so possibly I'm going to write something. Do drop by!

What will India do now?

2009-03-03T00:39:00.001-08:00

Normally when we write India it signifies the state i.e. the government but here I refer to the people of India. India, the largest democracy in the world is undoubtedly greatest because of the religious, cultural, ethnical, historical and geographical diversities it posesses.

Date for Elections has been announced i.e. April 16, 2009.

With this announcement, many debates have started on who to vote for? What India needs? What youths of India need (and I notice that this debate is larger than any other - as if India is just a young India - and other age-groups have suddenly exterminated).

Yesterday night I was watching NDTV's show Vinod Dua Live and heard few thoughts by M. J. Akbar and was impressed by the clarity of thoughts he has. He said that it is not about a young prime minister or an older prime minister. What youths want is a person who can think for them, who can give them a future or vision, who can also understand that youths are not only people with cell phones in hand and ear phones stuffed in ears but actually they are also people who don't yet (year 2009) have basic necessities like food and water and electricity at their homes. Even they are young. Although for making it to Times of India home page you have to be a dynamic IIM graduate who cribs about not being offered a Rs 1 crore salary job (like his seniors) OR a software developer who has been sacked off job recently but we have to accept the presence of the youth who still asks if he can get some work for Rs 100 a day.

According to Dua, there are several different classes of youth in current Indian society. One class is so rich that it does not care who rules and how. They are so well off that who wins or loses and who governs does not make any difference. This class does not vote. Then there is a group which is well off, which takes education and gets a decent job. This group thinks that it cannot make a difference. This group also does not vote. Then there is this group of youth who is not well off, not even educated enought to get a decent job and who believes still in democracy and it is this group which is going to decide this time who comes to power this election.

My personal opinion is that it is our country and if we remain a spectator then same things will keep happening. I've heard more than 100 times in my life advice that if you want to change the country then join politics but I don't buy that opinion and think that we can change the country even by selecting the people who govern. we have this right to think on which political party has most rigid plan for the development of India and right to exercise our vote to get them to power. Now onus is on us.

In America, Barrack Obama won the elections against J. McCain. It was an election of Hope against Fear. People chose hope. I think here in India also we will make a rational choice rather than coming in influence of fanatics who are not even sure of what they want to do.

DeskTwitter v 2.0

2009-01-17T00:54:00.000-08:00

Released today the version 2.0 of the AIR application that I wrote few months back, DeskTwitter. This is an attempt to bring twitter experience out of the browser. This release contains following additional features -

1. Now user can update his status (or send tweet) from the UI.

2. User can see his friends list always and does not have to hit his own profile image to get the friends list.

3. Colors and fonts have been changed to make it more attractive. (feedback welcome)

A snapshot of how it looks like -

You can download it from here. Do try it. You will need Adobe AIR runtime to install and enjoy the AIR experience (and it takes not more than few seconds to install AIR runtime). Please come up with what you feel missing in the application (features) or what you feel is broken (bugs) at awasthi dot manoj at gmail dot com.

Download link for Desktop Twitter version 2.0

Boss Diversification

2009-01-16T05:16:00.000-08:00

Charlie Wood talks about doing a startup in the troubled economy and I liked the following extract in particular where he coins a new term called Boss Diversification.

.. Boss Diversification. When you work for a company, your employer is your customer and you have only one customer for your services. Lose that customer and you're screwed. When you work for yourself, each of your customer/clients is your boss. Lose any one of them and it's not the end of the world. The more customers, the more diversified you are. So consulting is good but high volume products are better.

Values Matter?

2008-11-11T20:08:00.000-08:00

An excerpt from an earlier post that I wrote -

My confusions is should we, in the short span of human life (actively, I think we live for not more than 80-85 years) live and die for virtues? Do they exist? and Is it natural? OR we just overvalue them?

While discussing with a friend of mine, after watching 'Mother India', I asked "Why wasn't this movie given an Oscar?.. This is a classic story and a zenith of perfection in acts" .. He replied "One of my uncle says that it was because of the scene where Nargis goes to Lala when she does not have food for her children and Lala wants to bed with her. West says it is impractical that Nargis all of a sudden, slapped and came back.. What made Nargis slap Lala? Conscience. But she went there because she was on the verge where she should have been ready for 'anything' for the food for children".. Yes. I agree to my friend's uncle. But I think people behind the making of Mother India knew that Indian audience would never accept it.. They were not mature enough. A scene from "Forrest Gump" runs through my mind as I write this. The scene where Forrest's mother sleeps with the principal so that he could be admitted in a normal school.

Recently I read about the life of George Soros (the billionaire trader and a worldwide known philanthrope). He is a Jew and they lived in Hungary. When in 1940s there were German forces in Hungary and taking over the control, his father Tivador said "This is an emergency.. All normal rules are suspended. If we remain law-abiding citizens, we are going to perish..". Tivador made "forged" documents for his son, his wife and himself to prove their "christian" identity (or hide their Jewish).. Forgery - against the values that we are taught. But it has to be like this if you are to survive.

There is another incident where George (as a child) tells some Jews that the decree that requires them to move to some port is actually meant to harm them and they will be dead if they follow the orders (this was told to him by his father and Tivador asked him to say this to as many Jews as possible) and some of the Jews responded "We believe in the laws of the country.. we should not and will not break the law" and "we have never done anything wrong so why would god do anything bad to us".. Almost forty thousand Jews were killed after the deportation.

Tivador was an escapist I would say. I enjoyed reading about George's father more than him. He could save his family by using forged document and by not losing himself. Your survival is important for the survival of people who depend on you. Later, another incident tells how tactful he was. Russian troops had taken over the Germans. Hungary was free of the brutalities by the Nazis. But now, Russians were the god. Russian soldiers would ask for money and for girls and for anything.. and Hungarians felt an obligation. One day, two russian soldiers came in Tivador's broken house which they were reconstructing and asked for sex with a young girl, a relative of Tivador. George recalls in the biography how his father handled the soldiers asking them to settle and have tea and then took them to the nearest brothel telling that he will arrange more beautiful girls out there. He saved the girl without any blood (which would have been most probably his).

Survival is the only thing natural in the existance of Animals and ultimately that's what we are. Family, Society, Nations, Goverments and other systems have actually not made any differences.

Your life may matter but I really doubt if death does.

This was few months back. Yesterday, I was watching hindi flick 'Swarg (1990)' starring Rajesh Khanna and Govinda in lead. Movie was on similar themes as another Rajesh Khanna starrer 'Avatar' and based on values. Just values. Lot of things happened too magically in the movie and if i term it 'moral quotient' then that was too high in few lead characters. Note the use of word 'too'. Has it become very impractical today to have those age-old-beliefs of truth, loyalty, honesty? Is all talk about values fake or nonexistant?

Transliteration in google search

2008-10-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

Desktop Twitter - twitter out of the browser

2008-10-07T00:58:00.000-07:00

Desktop Twitter is an Adobe AIR desktop application written in Flex (Actionscript) and it is an attempt to bring the twitter experience out of the browser. Current version of the application that am giving out so it contains minimal features. A screenshot is shown at left. Twitter Rest APIs are quite simple to use and developing any such application becomes painless using them.

Current set of features include -

1. On entering the user name of the user whose desk twitter page you wish to see, you get the list of thumbnails of friends of this user near the bottom.

2. On selecting any thumbnail you get to see the details of that user. Account information is shown in the right top box, twitter updates are shown in the left big box and thumbnails of the friends of the selected user are shown in the right bottom box.

Issue Known - On scrolling the list of thumbnails fast, thumbs disappear. This is a bug with Flex and am looking around to fix this ASAP. You can workaround by scrolling really slow. :D

Missing - Help is missing for now but will be available in next release (soon) (Details of the different panels are intended to be clear by the labels provided. ). No caching of thumbnails is done and hence sometimes there may be some delay in loading of images.

Application can be downloaded from here. You will need to install Adobe AIR runtime (takes not more than few seconds) to install (again, not more than a few seconds) and use this application. Please download the application, try it out and report any bugs, suggestions, features at awasthi.manoj@gmail.com.

Book Review: The Automatic Millionaire

2008-09-10T22:45:00.000-07:00

The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach says on its cover that it's a powerful one-step plan to live and finish rich. Well, not untrue. David tells you everything any investment or personal finance book would tell you adding just one more step to each - automating it. Instead of being disciplined about finance you should make it automatic. Get it deducted automatically from your bank account. This way you never, absolutely never, miss it. You don't want to. I loved the book because it's short (just 250 pages), it's precise (tells you to take steps rather than plain old fundas of generating money) and it probably works for you already (most of us already have applied it to some kind of investments - time is just to apply that on all investments).

Apart from being educative, this is an interesting read as well. So, if you are still in doubt about your plans on how to make money, this would surely get you one way for that - but you might need to cut on that extra money you spend each morning on Latte ;) (See Latte Calculator below).

Finish Rich Website. Latte Calculator.

YouSuggest - The Suggestion Box is now Social

2008-08-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

Nilesh Trivedi announced yesterday what they have been upto these days at LatticePurple and this announcement made me quite excited about the all the buzz about social networking. The product is YouSuggest - a social suggestion box. As mentioned in the introducing blog post -

It is a modern way of asking your community to come up with suggestions, feedback and ideas that they care about, vote in an open and social environment and also encouraging a rich interaction between you and your community.

He had got a marvellous presentation pitching YouSuggest on Slideshare. It's kinda a good idea leveraging the social networking concept. All the best to Nilesh and team.

_

New offerings from Google

2008-07-25T22:42:00.000-07:00

If you didn't notice, try Google Knol (Google's version of wikipedia with some notable differentiation of course) and Google Sites ("A poor man's (pretty darn good) intranet." as quoted on workhappy.net).
_

Few notes of wisdom for programmers

2008-07-04T06:26:00.000-07:00

Some of the notes I took while reading Pragmatic Programmer -

1. The Cat Ate My Source Code: Provide Options. Don't make lame excuses.

Take Responsibility. Do think while taking responsibilities and accept it. Don't take responsibilities without thinking over them. When you make an error or misjudge then admit it honestly. Don't blame someone or something else or make an excuse. Don't blame all the problems on the vendor, a programming language, management or your coworkers. Any and all of these may play a role but it is you to provide solutions and not problems.

Before you approach anyone to tell why something can't be done, is late or broken, stop and listen to yourself. Talk to the rubber duck on your monitor, or a cat. Does it sound reasonable or stupid? How is it going to sound to your boss?

As yourself questions like "Have you tried this...", "Did you consider this.." and provide options. Before you tell them, is there anything else that you can try? Sometimes, you just "know" what they are going to say, so why give them trouble.

2. Software Entropy: Don't live with broken windows.

Take into account "The Broken Window Theory" to fix any broken window (bad design, poor code or wrong decision) as soon as they are discovered. Theory says that any prestinely beautiful code is clean only till there are absolutely no broken windows. If there is a small design mistake, that makes it easy for others to checkin some more mistakes. So identify and remove that crappy piece of code there, which all of you stare at with anguish, ASAP.

3. Be a catalyst for change. Fight the "startup fatigue".

4. Remember the big picture. Have an eye over the changes happening to the software (not only your changes).

5. Make Quality a requirements issue.

It is sometimes very useful to review what you wrote.

Privacy, More Privacy and Propoganda!

2008-07-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

When I barcamped for the first time in Barcamp Delhi III, I had a mind-swing about all the talks about privacy. I've been always under the awareness of threat of privacy breach issues (especially caught by the omnipresent paranoia from google). Articles and work of fiction about Google and privacy can be found whole over the net. During one of the last presentations that I attended at the Barcamp (one by Greg Narain) about the way social web applications should be architected, when Greg asked about saving the preferences of the user who come to you say their last searches on your site, one of the attendees shouted over ".. few days back when Google disclosed some searches, there was a huuuuuuuuge debate over it. how safe & ethical do you think this is? I may not want you to remember where am I travelling..." etcetera. I agreed since mind swing was yet to happen.

Silently sitting on a park bench at the petrol station on my way down to home from office while (waiting for) getting the air pressures checked in the tyres (hate doing this; but so do I brushing teeth twice; few things just-have-to-be-done) and having a coke (nothing better was available), a thought ran over the brain's nerves. If I ask this guy checking my tyre's air pressure something that I would not like anyone else to know (this can be anything but I can read your mind) then how would I ensure that this guy does not propagate this to "anyone" ('anyone' includes his wife). Then probably a legal paper (or electronic form) named "Terms (& Conditions) of Service" would be required for "the service". He needs to publish that and I need to agree, but.. but what if it misses this particular point. Then what do I do? teach him ethics? or go to court telling that this is absolute crappy service which does not respect my privacy?

None of these are going to help!

Unless we have someone providing "the service" with a "Terms (& Conditions) of Service" that has the point that we are looking for, we have only one option left - not using it.

Analogy I guess is set now. If I search on "Google Search" something that I do not want someone (or anyone) else to know then I have several ways to do so --

1. Do an 'anonymous' search (logout, from google) and then do a search. (Checking in advance that "recording of IP address" or "machine specific information" is not being done by reading TOS)

2. Keeping a separate account (fakifying yourself) to do this search

3. No number 3. Just don't use the service.

When we are here doing business, it involves you (the consumer) and Google (the service provider) and TOS does not say that Google would not "remember" your data; Neither it says it will not "use" your data; ... then if you still use the service, why would you blame Google for it? and why would (should) Google pay you a dime?

Or am I just thinking without reading/learning about what I am talking about?? Thoughts?

Disclaimer - all thoughts are my "personal" views.

Try Ruby!

2008-06-15T01:26:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been into a situation when you want to strike down few keystrokes of Ruby code and are not having the ruby interpreter installed on the system available to you then? I've been into this more than one time. But it is not possible to fetch Ruby installer on the machine, install and get the things working all the time - too much work and too invasive in case it is your brother's machine. Just stumbled upon this beautiful web service. Try Ruby! provides you an online interactive shell (just like the shell when you invoke irb on your machine) where you can play around with the code you wanna write. Too good. So, guys get rolling with Ruby!!

_

Recovery from loss, the five stages

2008-04-18T07:02:00.000-07:00

This is for the second time that I am blogging about Fall and Rise of David Pottruck. He has been a hero for me. This article from Fast Company describes the five stages of recovery from any kind of loss and believe me I could relate them to just any loss - in business, in academics, in personal life.

Stages of Recovery from Loss -

1. Shock And Disbelief: The initial reaction to a loss is a stunned, numb feeling and refusal by the individual to acknowledge the reality of the loss.

2. Developing Awareness: Awareness of the loss creates feelings of emptiness, frustration, anguish, and despair.

3. Restitution: In this stage, the various rituals associated with loss within a culture are performed.

4. Resolution of Loss: The concept of the loss is idealized. Preoccupation with the loss gradually decreases over a year or more.

5. Recovery: Obsession with the loss has ended, and the individual is able to go on with his or her life.

Similar things followed in the life of Lee Iacocca when he was fired from Ford. I think these are the stages anyone has to go through after any significant loss, be it losing some near and dear one (due to a breakup or more perturbing say a death where chances are not even feeble that you will ever be able to talk with him/her) or losing a game or suffering huge losses in business or ... Did you ever had some situations when you could feel these stages?

... Relaxed!

2008-04-16T01:07:00.000-07:00

I've not been able to blog for long time (yeah, it was a long time) and well, I've not been able to do a lot of things I love to do (Read books, listen to music, go for long slow walks or long fast drive etcetera) - all due to work! Some last minute humongous changes in plans at work resulted in all the turbulence. Turbulence was so much that I could not give (proper) time to lot many people. It did cost me a lot (Can't much discuss them). I'm now done with an awaited milestone. As Shakespeare said, All's well that ends well. I'm getting back to life. slowly though.

Now, you can be invisible with arrival of (probably) the most awaited feature from Google Mail

2008-03-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

They say, it is so late. I say, better late than never. Gtalk is one of the most popular IMs used in the world and this feature adds your control over when you wish to be seen and when not. You still can see other people who're online and chat with them. Same protocol pioneered by Yahoo! but well it's not about the feature, it's about overall user experience.

Update: Not yet available on gtalk it seems. Only in browsers.

Movie: Virruddh

2008-03-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

It's midnight. I ended up watching Viruddh on television and temptation to praise was so strong that I am blogging. Viruddh is a 2005 movie starring Amitabh Bachchan, Sharmila and John Abraham. It is based on the fight for justice of 60 something couple after their only son gets killed in a fight. I won't put anything about the plot here (not because I don't want to spoil as I know most of you must have watched the movie, but because I am feeling sleepy). It is an awesome movie. Amitabh is "the" actor and one of those few who have the power to bring tears rolling down your cheeks (I did had). Amazing. Movie plot (story) is also beautiful and it tells you that probably we (humans) are too vulnerable to destiny (or say random events happening around). The death of a young son renders the old couple in a pathetic situation. A must watch.

Being Assertive

2008-03-08T22:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a disturbing day for me and the disturbance was all inside me. It was height of boredom. Morning was nice but boredom kept increasing and by the evening, it was unbearable. I left home to meet a friend (idea came out of nowhere) and felt slightly better, just slightly.

Night when I came back, all of a sudden, I thought of sorting the books on my shelf and got hold of a small book on assertiveness with the title "Assertiveness" by Jeanie Civil. I bought it almost three years back when a personality development trainer at Hughes Software Systems suggested me to read (and apply) it. His diagnosis was that I really needed help and was suffering from this un-assertiveness. I took it seriously then. For few days.

I took the book out, sorted the shelf and then laid back on my bed with the book.

Now, I am done with the introduction and one of the sections (on self-confidence) and feel that there is this problem and that is the reason probably behind a lot of things I was worried about (I get bored very soon for example). I am pretty sure that there are many people suffering from such disorders and I am also pretty sure that doing few small things daily will create an enormous difference. I am seriously willing to get rid of this since I get hurt by this. I will workout on this as per this book. I now take it seriously. Forever.

What is Assertiveness?

Assertiveness is about being open, honest and direct. It is about being focused and asking for what you want or need while recognizing that other also have needs. It is not to be confused with Aggressiveness. For Assertiveness, you need to be positive but since no-one can be positive all the time, so in those times, we respond with one of the emotions of "fight" (retaliate), "flight" (run away - e.g. failure), "fright" (misunderstanding with someone in authority), "freeze" (unable to respond).

What do you gain by being Assertive?

Self-Love and Improved self worth.
Self confidence
Improved quality of life
Trust
Respect
Influence
Genuine Relationships

What do you lose by being Assertive?

Nothing

What do you gain by being Non-Assertive?

A quiet life
Avoidance of conflict
Control of Inner feelings
Praise for conforming
Feelings that you're "being used"
sometimes depression

What do you lose by being Non-Assertive?

the ability to clear the atmosphere of conflict
the respect of others
the power to make decisions
success in relationships
emotional wellbeing

While going through the analysis of self confidence, I got to know that there are following kinds of personalities which might have crept inside because of early childhood experiences -

Three paragraphs follow each head - definition, analysis and what-to-do --

The Be Perfect Person

These people tend to focus on what is wrong rather than what is right. This holds true for anything they have to review (might be own work). You keep trying to give 100% when giving 80% would be fine. You keep looking for that spelling mistake on the page 90 of the report that is to be submitted and that bothers you so much that you forget to appreciate the toil put in preparing the report. Small imperfections in the things that you prepare may leave you sleepless. These are the people who have been told in their childhood to aim for perfection.

You have a strong feeling of guilt. You're anxious of making a mess of things. You sometimes experience feeling of worthlessness and depression.

You need to give yourself the permission to appreciate the wonderful variety of human attributes and values.

The Pleasing People Person

If you've found this creature chatting you, then you'll nod a lot and smile even when you don't agree with someone or feel upset. You're probably liked but may be ineffectual while sorting out a conflict. When you were a kid, you were probably told "What the neighbours will say" or "Be nice to people" and that crept in. You find it really difficult to say "No".

You've a fear of being misunderstood. You constantly consider other people's needs and fear being rude to them.

You need to give yourself permission to please yourself and let others please themselves. Be free to like or dislike people. When people reject you, you don't have to reject yourself.

The Hurry Up Person

Everything is such a rush for you. You're always busy doing so many things simultaneously. Hurrying here and hurrying there and still thinking what else you ought to be doing instead. When you are in a meeting, you think whom you need to meet at lunch. You probably tap your fingers or twitch your leg more than most. Your speed is admirable but how are people around you affected. You can irritate people with your inability to listen and reflect. As a child you were told to "Hurry up" for everything. Those situations are not true now but the "Hurry Up" bird still sits on your shoulders.

You often have a major feeling of panic, not being able to think and fatigue. You may experience a constant feeling of lateness and always hurrying to fit in too many things. You sometimes have a sense of not belonging.

You need to give yourself some selfish time.

The Be Strong Person

You hardly have a time off work and go in even when you are ill. You're in there in rail and shine, in sickness and in health, never recognizing when you're tired or hungry. When you were small, probably you were told "Be strong" or "Boys don't cry" or "Don't let them know you're hurting".

You often fear being unappreciated and want to stay invulnerable to others. You're often and easily bored. You can't get close to people and maintain a feeling of being unlovable.

You need to share your feelings and ask for help.

The Try Harder Person

If you have found that your internal dialogue is about trying harder then you are probably always searching for something else. You are always on the lookout for future, the next. In this process you forget to think "For what I'm trying harder?". As a child you were told "Could do better". May be you come from school and said "I came second in the class" only to hear "who came first?". May be there were occasions when you did the best but it was no so well recieved and you thought "I need to try harder".

You've a fear of failure and may think "I'm not as good as I (or others) think I am".

You need to give yourself the permission to fail - and to succeed so that you can get on things and "feel" successful.

Well, apart from those, You should accept and give compliments gracefully. If someone congratulates you on your promotion or a good job or a better presentation say "Thank you!". Similarly if someone else does a job worth appreciation, step forward to congratulate him.

You also need to take care of body language. All this is lot of work and will take weeks for certain. I recommend you reading this (or may be some other book) on assertiveness if you think you are unable to be assertive on your job or home because being happy is probably the first condition in following your heart.
_

"Me too" from Linkedin makes sense

2008-03-06T06:51:00.000-08:00

Just noticed among the big set of changes that linkedin has made in the user interface, a new feature where user can tell the world what he is doing currently. This is a concept pioneered by twitter and copied by facebook (and some other social-networking apps) which I certainly found interesting there but not useful (or purposeful). Content creation is the only theme behind twitter and hence gives users an opportunity to be more creative. On Linkedin, this feature makes perfect sense (and probably less noise since I assume that people using it are sensible and won't put something like "I'm fixing a bug in..." - just for the sake of updating it daily). It makes a lot of sense but I think employers would need to chip-in and make policies clear as to what their employees can announce on linkedin and what not since privacy-wise linkedin has less to offer.

Shlemiel The Painter's Algorithm

2008-02-21T17:29:00.000-08:00

Shlemiel gets a job as a street painter, painting the dotted lines down the middle of the road. On the first day he takes a can of paint out to the road and finishes 300 yards of the road. "That's pretty good!" says his boss, "you're a fast worker!" and pays him a kopeck.

The next day Shlemiel only gets 150 yards done. "Well, that's not nearly as good as yesterday, but you're still a fast worker. 150 yards is respectable," and pays him a kopeck.

The next day Shlemiel paints 30 yards of the road. "Only 30!" shouts his boss. "That's unacceptable! On the first day you did ten times that much work! What's going on?"

"I can't help it," says Shlemiel. "Every day I get farther and farther away from the paint can!"

--JoelOnSoftware

So think before you check-in that code containg a series of strcats which is as brutal as a loop (although looks too linear). It hurts.
_

Halla Bol.. and random thoughts about alternate histories

2008-01-26T23:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I watched 'Halla Bol', a movie based on the mob-arousal to take charge against the crime. It seems motivated a lot by the followings of 'Jessica lal murder case' which led to re-opening of the case. Movie is good to watch and has different facets - the joy of a nukkad play director (and producer too I think), the rise of an actor from nukkad plays to bollywood (and how a 'lie' was actually required to get the entry- pragmatism), the adaptation of the actor into the reel life ("change in character"), and the an incident which ultimately causes introspection and later realization of the virtues and this part is the major half of the movie.

But just in the midst of the movie I was intermittently lost in my own thoughts which mostly were confusions. Confusions about human life and virtues. Let's assume some alternate histories. Alternate history is an alternate set of events that "could" have happened. This discussion is slightly under the assumption that you've watched the movie but I will try to make it complete. Let me introduce some characters - Ashfaq is the nukkad actor who ultimately becomes the bollywood star sameer khan (Ajay Devgan), his wife (Vidya Balan), his father, his mother, his son, his guru Siddhu (Pankaj Kapur).

Notation: [A] denotes what happened in the movie and [B] denotes the alternate history (what could have happened)

1. Ashfaq's career.

Ashfaq goes to Mumbai to make a career in movies. No doubt he is a good actor but so are many other Ashfaqs. He finally gets a chance to meet a director who is quite impressed with Siddhu's play group and actors. Director says that he is looking out for one of the play mates of Ashfaq and asks his whereabouts.

A. Ashfaq 'lies' here saying that ".. that guy is no more". 'Lie' that does wonders to his career, his dreams.

B. Ashfaq does not 'lie' about it and helps in the friend's career building.

Movie could have ended in something like 'Chala Ashfaq Hero Banne' (work of fiction in my mind..)

2. Sameer Khan (Ashfaq renamed) in the nightclub where murder happens

Sameer is coming out of the washroom when he sees a girl Rashmi (whom he met casually in the part few minutes back) crying for help after being stabbed by two guys whom Sameer can see clearly through a glass window).

A. Sameer is astonished. Before he could think anything, girl is shot dead. Bad guys (one of them is a son of minister and another one, the son of a tycoon) move away quietly and it seems that everyone in the party knew of the murder but probably due to Mob Psychology remain silent spectator.

B. Sameer sees the girl crying and instantly decides to help her. He breaks the glass, gets the girl behind some wall, and tries fighting the guys (who due to immense power they think they have, decide to attack Sameer). In the fight, he is hit with few bullets.

Movie turns into another 'Viruddh'. Sameer's father keep fighting for the 'Justice'. (Viruddh is a bollywood movie starring Amitabh Bachchan, John Abraham where a father fights for justice for the murder of his young son who got murdered for trying to save a girl)

3. Siddhu comes to meet his student when Sameer has become a big star

Siddhu comes to Sameer and asks him for a help in fighting for Justice for a woman in a village in Maharashtra. This woman was molested and later asked to move in village naked. Police and Administration ignored it because of the involvement of power people (who else? If someone weak steals even a bread, he is beaten like hell.. I think you must have seen the pictures when these incidents happened in Bihar). Siddhu wants to make people aware of it and wants Sameer to involve into it for escalation (Sameer being a star, play would get more media coverage and government will need to react fast).

A. Sameer does not want to involve in any controversy because that would affect his career. A sequence of dialogue that happens is moving - the talks on virtues that do something within us.

Sameer: .. Lagti kya hai woh aapki? .. kyon madad karna chahte ho usski? [ .. Why the hell do you want to help her? ]

Siddhu: Arre.. Apni chot par to Jaanwar bhi rota hai. Insaan hai jo doosron ki chot ko mahsoos kar sakta hai. [ On own wounds, even animals cry. Human is (one) who can feel other's pain]

B. Sameer Khan agrees to it. He becomes the part of the Nukkad play.

Movie would become a real-life incident that happened with Aamir Khan. Aamir Khan got involved into Narmada Bachao and his films sought a ban in Several States. It's Aamir Khan who could fight back because of the kind of talent he has. But still, career was hit.

4. Sameer's introspection.

Sameer decides that he won't be mute to the whole episode. He goes to police station, records his statement and as he starts moving out, he comes to know that even police is involved with bad guys. People threaten him.

A. Bad guys somehow get the security-men removed and Sameer's son's room is set on fire. Small burns received.

B. His son is murdered or dies in fire or ...

Movie becomes something like 'Shool'.. ('Shool' is a movie where a police inspector in Bihar fights against corruption losing his child and wife in the process. Starring Manoj Bajpai, Raveena Tandon)

5. Sameer's car is crushed by a truck

Sameer, on the way from minister's house (where he challenges the minister and even pees there in his hall) is attacked by a truck.. His car is crushed. He lies half-hung in the car and truck moves towards him.

A. Just in time, Siddhu comes with a truck in between. (this is one event highly improbable)

B. Sameer is crushed to death.

Media would say that Sameer's death is linked to either the accusations about his involvement with the murdered girl's sister OR bad relations and depression due to wife.. (because just before this verdict has been given against sameer, so people would not suspect minister's hand in it.. or even if they do, how many days? we all know the life-cycle of a story on media.. hardly a month)

6. Sameer Khan in Hospital

Sameer Khan in the nukkad play to create awareness in mob, gets hit by local gundas (sent by minister) and is badly injured.

A. Siddhu gives a visit. While coming out he shouts on cameras telling that people responsible for sameer's condition are not those 30-40 people who beat him but 3000 people who were witnessing it and not getting in to protect, those media people who kept clicking their cameras to get the next colourful (and bloody) story on their newspaper and magazines, those policemen who kept moving here and there (trying to finish their eight-hour duty). This causes a revolution taking place. People come in support of the cause - mass awakening. (I doubt it. I've seen this period in real-life and feel that such awakening is only for as-much-a-time as you are personally not hit. To be a part of a mob is quite easy but being there when you are thrashed, harder. It happened last year when there was a wave similar to that cinematized in the movie, when almost everyone was talking of it. Now, if that was awakening then what happened in mumbai when a lover stabbed his girlfriend in public, what happened when police beat openly the students demonstrating against reservation, what happened when a mob mishandles two women, .... )

B. Siddhu does not give a visit OR Siddhu does give a visit but does not speak anything.

B. Another possibility is Sameer's death in hospital.

Nothing happens. Why? Because we are so much dependent on what we are fed by Media. If Media shows us Siddhu (referring to movie and not the cricket star) speaking, we feel motivated. If media shows us the politician saying that actor was paid by the opposition for all this, we can believe that too. Too much dependence on media. If media wants us to think, we think. When it wants us not to think (by showing us laughter challenge episodes instead of something pertaining to society..), we don't think. They rightly said that "Pen (ahem, it's more than that now) is mightier than sword"..

That was it.

So what was the confusion: My confusions is should we, in the short span of human life (actively, I think we live for not more than 80-85 years) live and die for virtues? Do they exist? and Is it natural? OR we just overvalue them?

While discussing with a friend of mine, after watching 'Mother India', I asked "Why wasn't this movie given an Oscar?.. This is a classic story and a zenith of perfection in acts" .. He replied "One of my uncle says that it was because of the scene where Nargis goes to Lala when she does not have food for her children and Lala wants to bed with her. West says it is impractical that Nargis all of a sudden, slapped and came back.. What made Nargis slap Lala? Conscience. But she went there because she was on the verge where she should have been ready for 'anything' for the food for children".. Yes. I agree to my friend's uncle. But I think people behind the making of Mother India knew that Indian audience would never accept it.. They were not mature enough. A scene from "Forrest Gump" runs through my mind as I write this. The scene where Forrest's mother sleeps with the principal so that he could be admitted in a normal school.

Recently I read about the life of George Soros (the billionaire trader and a worldwide known philanthrope). He is a Jew and they lived in Hungary. When in 1940s there were German forces in Hungary and taking over the control, his father Tivador said "This is an emergency.. All normal rules are suspended. If we remain law-abiding citizens, we are going to perish..". Tivador made "forged" documents for his son, his wife and himself to prove their "christian" identity (or hide their Jewish).. Forgery - against the values that we are taught. But it has to be like this if you are to survive.

There is another incident where George (as a child) tells some Jews that the decree that requires them to move to some port is actually meant to harm them and they will be dead if they follow the orders (this was told to him by his father and Tivador asked him to say this to as many Jews as possible) and some of the Jews responded "We believe in the laws of the country.. we should not and will not break the law" and "we have never done anything wrong so why would god do anything bad to us".. Almost forty thousand Jews were killed after the deportation.

Tivador was an escapist I would say. I enjoyed reading about George's father more than him. He could save his family by using forged document and by not losing himself. Your survival is important for the survival of people who depend on you. Later, another incident tells how tactful he was. Russian troops had taken over the Germans. Hungary was free of the brutalities by the Nazis. But now, Russians were the god. Russian soldiers would ask for money and for girls and for anything.. and Hungarians felt an obligation. One day, two russian soldiers came in Tivador's broken house which they were reconstructing and asked for sex with a young girl, a relative of Tivador. George recalls in the biography how his father handled the soldiers asking them to settle and have tea and then took them to the nearest brothel telling that he will arrange more beautiful girls out there. He saved the girl without any blood (which would have been most probably his).

Survival is the only thing natural in the existance of Animals and ultimately that's what we are. Family, Society, Nations, Goverments and other systems have actually not made any differences.

Your life may matter but I really doubt if death does.

Happy Republic Day

2008-01-26T04:43:00.000-08:00

The Myth of Work Satisfaction

2008-01-23T23:57:00.000-08:00

Work satisfaction, one of the most talked about phrase in the corporate, refers to the satisfaction level of an employee with his job. I've tried discussing with different people, in different settings and at different times about the work satisfaction. My people-set included software engineers, technical leaders, managers and HR guys (who are found boasting a lot about the culture, the work and almost anything that is -far- from the things that matter, the numbers).

A software engineer friend of mine is working in fifth company in the short term of three years of career (and I am sure you must be having data about "worse" cases) and he thinks that "why shouldn't I be concerned about money?". "Well you should be.. but my question is do you think work satisfaction matters.." I said. Prompt response, cutting my statement, "See dear, I've had more experience in terms of the number of companies" (he feels proud about it..) "and now I feel there is absolutely nothing like work satisfaction"..

This is true with other people too. When I casually asked an HR Manager the factor that motivates him most in coming to work in morning, I received a dead-honest answer. Money. His response exactly was "I feel most energy during the time when my bank account gets credited with salary". But doesn't he care about the kind of work he does? "I really don't. As far as you keep paying me, I am ready to do anything."

When I made first switch in job, there were two reasons primarily for moving. One, I was not happy working in a group where we had to develop demo-able applications (so sincerity was missing) with a team which "believed" that the group was not going anywhere (so the attitude to stretch a bit more was missing) - no challenges (I'm very cautious using this word as I was grilled at more than one occasions in interviews for uttering "no challenging work is the reason for looking for change" but believe me, it was no challenge). Second, I was the victim of peer-pressure (I don't know what I call it but people in their early employment years don't hesitate telling about the salaries they are drawing. envy steps in.) When asked about the reason to make the change (by my Managers), I shamelessly told that it is the peer-pressure, thinking that I won't be grilled much on this reason. I was right.

Having more than one offers (which is normally the case when you give-in papers), I had to decide about the next job I'll be in. I was uber confused on this matter. One of the offers was from a known brand in the field of rich media and creative work in Bangalore and others included startups in North India. Talking to few people I respected a lot, I decided to join a startup in Delhi. Around five-six months later when someone initiated the topic of work satisfaction (believe me, this discussion keep happening in some corner of the company you work for) and people wanted my opinion, my response was quite positive "I'm quite satisfied and happy with my work now.. I mean few people in my batch are doing the kind of work I'm getting exposed to". A technical lead promptly corrected me "..You actually are not eligible to answer that question.. Your honeymoon period is not yet over". He was right, around ten months later I was again looking out for change.

My stay with the startup was pleasure in terms of kind of people I met (most positive part of the stay), interesting code I could see and be part of, interesting insight into the engineering side of the business I got, an experience to see a product evolving and get a clarity into the fact that "Work satisfaction" is a myth. It does not exist. Here, I also started doing things that I loved e.g. reading books and blogs (and get time for them from however busy schedule) and this really worked. I was more satisfied.

Work satisfaction is just like happiness. There are two kind of happiness - persistent and non-persistent. Persistent happiness comes from achievements (things that are carved in time like you created something, you won some award, you were a part of something great - kernel is that this happiness remains to make you happy) and non-persistent happiness occurs in moments. You cannot crystallize those moments. Usually, we perceive happiness as non-persistent one. I feel happy when I read in the balcony with a cup of tea on a cold sunny morning but I cannot keep these moments with me forever. Similarly, normal definition of work satisfaction is flawed or momentous. You solve a seemingly-impossible-to-solve problem and you feel happy for few days but then it goes. That was non-persistent happiness. If you keep 'achieving' something (and you're sure that this achievement is something "won" by you and not a management gimmick to "motivate" you), I think you'll be happy from the work end. If you create a great service (may be useless like twitter), you will feel the persistent satisfaction out of it. Monetary aspect also has to be tied with work satisfaction since that is the primary reason people go to work (please don't shout but it is.)

So, gyst is that don't depend on your company to keep you satisfied. Keep yourself satisfied by --

1. Kind of quality that you put into the work you do at the workplace. Your experience should reflect in your work.
2. Try doing things that you love to do. Get time for them. (It can be Photography, travelling, reading or may be software development)
3. Plan your physical, financial, spiritual and personal goals (both short term and long terms), stick to them and keep reviewing them. This will probably help you avoid being eight-jobs-in-three-years-guy or a victim of peer-pressure.
4. Avoid the company of people whose core theme of discussion is "where-the-hell-are-we-working".
5. Be positive. If you think there is a problem, don't just complain. Try fixing it.
6. There are "Highs" and "Lows" in career of everyone, so don't get depressed.

Update: If you are feeling 'low' too much or too frequently then take a break (as a friend of mine asked me "Go to a tour.. but alone. Take break. Switch off your phone. Don't check your mailbox.. that's what vacation means") and think "what do you really want (to get, to be, to do...) ?". It helps!

and finally, before changing job ensure that you will not end up in same (or similar) situation an year (or two) later. If there is a possibility then please avoid the change. Keep a plan of the kind of growth you expect (yes, numbers) and kind of work you want to pursue. Also give it a due thought if it's a job change that you are seeking or time has come to have that long awaited plunge into entrepreneurship... People tell me that this is one path where you won't ever feel "bored" in its literal sense!!

I would love to be enlightened with your inputs on work satisfaction.. your experiences and thoughts.

Making people love to wait...

2008-01-12T03:31:00.000-08:00

For one thing Twitter has stolen my heart - see the picture. No user loves waiting. Temptation to close window is at peak when that rotating effect or glasshour appears (wherever) but Twitter's innovative one-line solution is worth appreciation - people may be glued to the window in the anticipation of how popular they are. brilliant!

the one-line solution (for those who cannot see the image properly) following text when it loads your contacts from gmail --

We're loading your contacts.
(It may take a bit longer if you're popular.)

Light. Humorous. Effective.

_

Book Review: The Pragmatic programmer

2007-12-31T03:10:00.000-08:00

One statement: a must for any software developer. You read this book and I testimony the claim mentioned at the back cover of the book that you will certainly be programming (and that includes, architecting, designing, coding, testing and refactoring) your software better.

In addition to being contentful, the book is stupendously interesting. Pragmatic Programmers' text should be on the shelfs of most software development companies.

_

Book Review: Break Free

2007-12-31T03:06:00.000-08:00

Break Free by Debashish Chatterjee is a small book on leadership and its basic theme is that it is you who has to decide to be leader. Everyone can be a leader in his own right and no one can snatch that right from you. He quotes one example of a slum girl in kolkata who gets a piece of bread from them and then chooses to share that piece with other children and hence chooses to be a leader. Book has many examples (including the one of Manjunath Shanmugam, IIM alumnus who was shot dead by oil mafias for fighting corruption) and stories and quotes by lot of leaders in corporate (and polity). Book also moves into spiritual face of leadership which I think, is the essence of leadership. I don't say that book is extraordinary read but I certainly can say that it has some remarkable content. I particularly got moved by Chatterjee's definition of a leader-

A leader solves the problem for himself and others (reminds me of the TOI lead india campaign advertisment video).

About Chatterjee: Debashish Chatterjee is currently the professor at Indian Institute of Managment, Lucknow and author of three books leading consciously, Light the fire in your heart, and The circle of love apart from this.

(Another) List of resolutions!

2007-12-31T01:50:00.000-08:00

but these sound really good. A list of resolutions by Donald Latumahina was published in the newspaper today. I would like to pick the following:

Be observant
Never let any idea go uncaptured
Try to learn something from the people I meet
Take a book or magazine wherever I go
Allocate a minimum of 30 minutes to read a book.
Meditate
Take time to reflect on your day. What have you done right? What have you done wrong? What can you do to improve yourself?
Drink water a lot
Exercise (regularly)
Take notes of every expense you make
Do something for the first time
Effectively read online articles
Learn to use a tool, either to improve your skill with a familiar tool or to learn a new tool.
Take your time to review your life goals
Rise early
Listen to educational and motivational audio programme when you are doing activities which do not need your full concentration
Be grateful for your day
Read a random article to expose you to new things
Have fun. Be passionate about life!

Photo: more by him on Flickr
_

The Elite Circle of $1 CEOs

2007-12-12T00:12:00.000-08:00

An interesting observation into the club of CEOs who opt not to have a hefty pay cheque and this includes Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt. Why do they do it? Read the article.
_

Barcamp Delhi III

2007-12-10T03:42:00.000-08:00

Saturday, I attended Barcamp Delhi 3 and was a good experience. Being caught up with some personal work, I decided to attend few presentations in advance, which I chose from the wiki page to attend - Amit Agarwal's presentation on blogging, Sur Max's on Ruby, Greg Narain's presentation on social networking..

When I was there, I met prashant (first meeting after lot of online conversations) and came to know of a presentation he had on "businesses based on user generated content". Piyush's presentation on "Why join an early stage startup?" was canceled.

So what about the experience?

Well, It was wonderful. Amit Agarwal's presentation on how to be a successful blogger was simply marvellous. He tells us very specifically what to do and what not? You can get the presentations at his webpage.

Presentation by Sur Max was content-fantastic (a short introduction to Ruby) but I personally did not much like the presentation - no offense to the guy's presentation skills (he was absolutely fabulous) but the order in which things got presented was not so fabulous. Focus was also missing a bit in the presentation. Any Ruby aficianado (am also one, although a naive as well) is very excited to make it a point for others to know the "greatness" of the language but there is a psychology barrier here. People working on Php won't agree to that unless you show some magic live! so, "pushing" that Ruby is great is not going to work. Show them some magic things and that works better and due to this, later major of presentation was really nice time.

you may wish to see why i fell in love with Ruby? (my pitch..).

I also got introduced to Alabot which describes itself as "Intelligent Business Agent's Platform for Instant Messaging". Now its presentation was promising and it seems that these guys have worked really hard in using AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to develop a solution (a bot) which will respond to your questions by trying to understand your (may be poor grammer) language and then getting the information desired by mining relevant databases. I seriously think if they really have this kind of solution ready (they said they will be out next month), it is gonna be a (real) big leap in AI industry.

Presentation by Prashant is available at slideshare. This was about the business opportunities with user generated content. It was a brilliant presentation and all-sense talk. He backs everything with facts (and why not, he is an avid reader and a program manager) and that makes it more interesting.

Then a presentation by Greg Narain from blue whale labs, was about the user experience part in the development of social applications. Absolutely wonderful! This was the last presentation that I attended and was a brilliant one. Presentation is available at the website of blue whale labs. Do go through it. You will miss the talk (unless he gets aware of slidecast and uploads one there) but even slideshow is brilliant.

During this presentation itself, I met Amit (after certainly a long time). I didn't expect he would recognize but he did.

Overall, a great time barcamping.

Barcamp Icon created by: Piyush Gupta of Route Guru.

Election Agendas in Indian Politics

2007-12-01T00:58:00.000-08:00

This cartoon says it all..

Debashish Chatterjee (Professor, IIM Lucknow) talks about leadership in his book "Break Free!" and says that to solve a problem, you need to be a part of the problem. If you are not the part of the problem then that is a wobbling foundation to the efforts to solve the issue. He also quotes that leaders solve the problem for themselves (since they are a part of it) and others (this is an important aspect which distinguishes leaders and charlatans).

Time is high now for people to wake up and take charge (that's the only power democracy has) and discourage leaders (are they?) asking them votes for they belong to your caste or religion or region.
_

Kindle, Cool Gadget From Amazon

2007-11-20T01:14:00.000-08:00

This morning newspaper brung some smile on face looking at a news about the new product (gadget) by Amazon - Kindle, an ebook reader which can have ~ 200 Books (being a techy, I understand it would be a limit on memory requirement and not on the number of books but excitement is so much that I don't care about the press release details). It weighs 289gms and size is 134.5mm x 190mm x 18mm. Memory is 256 MB (internal) and expansion slot is also available. I don't see price information. Waiting for that!

Update: Prices are out. Kindle priced at $399. Buy your kindle here.

_

Controlling Feature Blot in Your Products

2007-11-16T22:35:00.000-08:00

A brilliant presentation by Rishi Bhargava I stumbled upon web, regarding Product Management's dilemma and feature blotting possibility in your product. Key things:

Lack of prioritization and its outcome
Why prioritization is the only way out?
What to do?
Exceptions to consider

Rishi is Director of Product Management at Solidcore Systems, Inc.

You can hear the presentation (mp3) and watch it using camtasia thing.

_

Why public voting should be there in Talent hunt shows?

2007-11-04T02:37:00.000-08:00

There has been ubiquitous debate over the involvement of voting in the talent hunt shows (mostly pertaining to more popular music shows like Sa Re Ga Ma, Indian Idol etc) and people are sad over the elimination of good contestants (probably favorites) due to voting elimination. Argument is that voting should be removed from the process and they actually do not believe into the fairness of system. Sounds right? No IMHO it does not.

I take it as an important and required process since it decentralizes decision to an enormous magnitude and hence is going to be far more fair than a case where the decision of the contest is to lie with three or four judges (who may also pocket some black money for the same). I do not claim 100% fairness in the current scheme but believe me if you empower judges to this level that they are the decision makers of the destiny of contenders then things will be far more flawed. I can suggest a better mechanism slightly more technical that after the voting starts (believe it starts at a certain stage only), start with a small weightage of public voting into the decision with more weightage on judge's evaluation and then as the competitors get smaller in number, keep increasing the weightage of public voting gradually. This is because the chances of judges being unfair increase towards the end of the competition.

disclaimer: these are just "my" views as a viewer of few talent search programmes hosted on television and do not represent any factual claims.
_

Blowing Up!

2007-11-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

Some thought experiments by Kahneman and Tversky correctly summarize people behavior and their risk appetite when it comes to gains and losses.

In first experiment, a group of people were told to imagine that they had three hundred dollars. They were then given a choice between (a) receiving another hundred dollars or (b) tossing a coin so that if they won they got two hundred dollars and if they lost they got nothing. Most of them, it turns out, prefer (a) to (b). But then Kahneman and Tversky did a second experiment. They told people to imagine that they had five hundred dollars, and then asked if they would rather (c) give up a hundred dollars or (d) toss a coin and pay two hundred dollars if they lost and nothing at all if they won. Most of them now prefer (d) to (c). From a probabilistic standpoint those four choices in the experiments are identical: they all yield an expected outcome of four hundred dollars. This behavior is because of the human psychology that we are more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse when it comes to gains.

Analogy can be applied straight to investor behavior patterns in stock markets when we like small daily winnings even if they entail the risk of losing everything in crash (whose probability is small but is a real event).

Read this interesting article on Blowing Up in Stock Market (by Malcolm Gladwell), way it ruins a successful (and glamerous) trader Victor Neiderhoffer and the ways Nassim Nicholas Taleb's firm Empirica works so that it does not blow up.

Also read: Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory
_

Book Review: The High Performance Entrepreneur

2007-10-28T01:17:00.000-07:00

Few days back while surfing books at Om Book Shop and for the first time having decided just to surf and not to buy, came across this book The High Performance Entrepreneur by Subroto Bagchi. I've been a fan and a follower of his articles. Since the motto of not buying the book was pre decided so instead of rushing to the payment desk, I sat at a chair nearby with the book. Then in not more than five minutes there was a mood swing and I decided that this book must be on my shelf. Reasons were

Having read (and discussed with friends) a few books on entrepreneurship, I (and my friends) almost always realized the need of a book which gives an indian context of the business development. I somehow felt that this is the book (having peeked into some examples in initial chapters).
Recommendation on the back of the book by likes of Vijay Govindrajan and C. K. Prahlad.
Author himself.

Having finished it I feel greatly thankful to myself for choosing the book. It is one of the best recommendations I would make. A must for any budding entrepreneur and has lot of resources for those who are at different phases of upbringing their companies. I liked specially the examples so well placed, elderly advises and warnings and vivid description of practical difficulties you face. Table of content speaks about what's inside and I will summarize it chapter wise --

When do I know if I am ready

The book starts with what a book on entrepreneurship should start from (yet sadly they don't). Just like Writer's block there's a bigger entrepreneurial block. You would daily watch and meet and talk to people who are on the verge of becoming an entrepreneur (they talk of it; they show their anguish on why haven't they started yet; etcetera) but how many of them (or you) are actually ready for it. Subroto Bagchi discusses this with examples showing incompetence, immaturity and the weaknesses of people. He then discusses the truth behind starting a venture (which sometimes is overromanticized), sacrifices that are simply mandatory. One you read the chapter, probably you will find an answer to the title of the chapter.

Profile of an Entrepreneur

This chapter discusses some qualities which are a must in an Entrepreneur. Self confidence (and you can build it over time, Subroto mentions particularly), sense of freedom with lot of discipline, diligence, goal orientation, flexible, opportunistic, egolessness (I really value it since you have to sell and without this attribute you really won't be able to), love for money (Mr Bagchi mentioned several places if you don't love money then don't go for business) are several attributes which are really to be on the profile.

Sensing the right opportunity

Choosing the team
This chapter provides a small set of things you must seek in people you would take up with you on venture. Avoid friends. Do not take kins. If cofounders complement each other then that is the best proposition. Everyone should be able to take own weight and sometimes extend to take on some additional work if required. "Startups are a matter of lifestyle" I remember the saying of one of senior colleagues at the previous company I worked for. Shared vision, Transparency and Personal integrity are really important traits. Sense of humour also finds a place in the list and importance is to the extent that Subroto might not take you on board if he finds it lacking - he feels if you don't have a light bone then you might not be able to fight till last.

DNA, Mission, Vision and Values

This gives some insight into why some companies are known and other are not. Companies are known by the kind of culture they develop inside and outside and that is driven by these important (and very often ignored by young entreprenurs).

How are you different

Differentiation is a key question when you meet your prospective employee, propspective investor, prospective customer and even a prospective shareholder. So build on fferentiation. Spend on knowing how are you different from the customers (or how can you be).

Writing the Business Plan

This chapter will provide you enough material to understand minutely what a business plan means and why is it given so much importance. There is a bulletted list of issues that the business plan must address.

Choosing the right investor

I read somewhere that it is not important how much money do you raise but whom do you take it from. Subroto Bagchi gives enough stress on the source of investment. He gives a list of things
to keep on mind while talking to VCs.

Getting good people and keeping them

This is all about hiring and talking about the responsibilities as they will be to the prospective employees. There is a huge difference between the number of people who "want" to work for startup and go for interviews and the number of people who "actually join". Again a comprehensive list of things is there int the chapter you must tell to the people who come for interviews. Expectations will be large and it should be communicated as early in the process as possible.

Building the process-focussed organization

Nothing is more true than the fact that startups are defamed for the process aspect. Lesser processes has become synonymnical to startup culture. Subroto Bagchi mentions and discusses with examples from MindTree experience that processes are important to follow and ultimately pay more.

A company is known by the customers it keeps

A talk on how to choose customers (yes!) and how to build good relationships and partnerships. Also mentioned at the end of the chapter are thirty golden rules for getting early customers.

Managing your money
If you try searching (aka googling) the facts why startups fail then one of the top reasons is that they run out of money. Here, in this chapter Bagchi mentions how to manage money. Where to lock it and where not. Where to spend each dime. Where to save. How and how not to use equity and why personal finance knowledge is a must for everyone in the founders team. He gives you clear directions e.g. Add a headcount only after people are running at 125% of their capacities and Do NOT hire full time people when you can rent and DO NOT hire office boys, gardener, security guards on company payroll.

Building your Brand

This chapter discusses about what Branding is and clarifies on some misnomer definitions. Also mentioned is how to create a successful brands. There are exceptions when just any name made it huge success (Google, Apple) and became a brand but that does not happen always and one has to be careful that when company scales one doesn't has to face lower revenues because
your name conflicts with some culture in the south east asia. Some home work won't ever hurt

Willingness to change

There is no such thing as "only way". There are always more options. Don't lock yourself in anything like this. Just do some out of box thinking, open your eyes to alternatives and you will have enough number of ways.

Managing Adversity

Here, Subroto Bagchi gives a list of things to have on mind to get through adversities. I won't publish it here but it's marvellous set. Be ready to face in real the worst of the dreams you had. Only thing certain about adversity is that it will be over

From Idea to IPO

Loved this chapter. Subroto acknowledges that this book being a guide book from budding entrepreneurs, putting a chapter on IPO is too much (and may be distracting). I loved to know the things that you must consider while getting public. There is a list by Subroto and then one by Rostow Ravanan. Brilliant.

Reasons Startup fail

Misunderstanding between cofounders and Underfundes projects are two major reasons of failures of startup. They also fail due to entrepreneurs (and cofounders) who don't let it go (is this something called micromanagement?). They fail when founders are more in love with idea and concept of being rich than building value for the long term. and yes, Startups also fail due to health and family reasons so do take good care of your health.

Final words;- A book which makes you realize that there is more to business creation than ".. 've a great idea" and "..wanna do something of my own fast..". It's about creating value which may take real long term and lot of energy out of your life, lot of sacrifices, pain, persistence and patience. But so what? once you have arrived you get the feel of real and persistent self gratification, so happy entrepreneurship !!

I, myself think that I would be using this book as a handbook for my journey whenever I begin one. This is one of the few books you must have for practical insight into doing things. Thanks to Subroto Bagchi for such a nice creation (in form of this book) after Mind Tree and I am sure this would help in the development of lot of high performance entrepreurs who know what they want to do and how.

About Subroto Bagchi: Founder and COO, MindTree Consulting.

Photo Courtesy: Manoj Awasthi (Me). Taken through Sony 850 Cybershot Camera Phone.
_

If Google Were Evil..

2007-10-15T23:57:00.000-07:00

SMILE! You're on Google camera

Now and then there are thoughts on 'privacy and google', so certainly not a new one but an interesting st ory to read (fiction) contemplating the power google may grow into.. scary thoughts!

"We don't know enough about you." —Google CEO Eric Schmidt

via: If Google were Evil..
_

Classical Problem Of Birthday Paradox

2007-10-15T00:22:00.000-07:00

Given 23 people randomly (and fairly) selected people in a room, what is the probability of two of them sharing the birthday?

If you give it to a layman far from the nittie-gritties of mathematics and probability theory, then his response would be really a small fraction tending towards zero since thinking of 23 randomly selected people (out of about 6.5 billion people on earth) who can have any birthday from amongst the 365 days in a (say non-leap) year (we just can't think big numbers easily). But mathematics and experimentation results into a different answer. It's almost 0.5 i.e. there is almost fifety percent probability that two people would be sharing there birthdays in a group of 23 people. strange but true!

Birthday Paradox on Wiki . Simple Solution
_

'Operation Three Star' - Hitting hard into the belly of the system but do we have a solution?

2007-10-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening I was at India Habitat Centre watching the play Operation Three Star, Hindi adaptation of the play "Accidental death of an Anarchist" directed by Arvind Gaur. Play is based around a 'suicide' by a suspected 'terrorist' at the police station jumping out of the window and unmasking of the criminal mindset of the law executing agency (Police) to cover up the brutal act (of pushing out the suspect out of the window forcibly). A maniac with sharp understanding of everything serious going around helps in the unmasking of the events that actually took place (and creates some really nice humor) by letting these guys reenact what happened. Subsequently, they contradict themselves to dismantle the whole issue of half-truths.

What I loved most was the play's climax. There are two climaxes actually. Towards the climax one of the inspectors in his urge to prove to his superiors that the guy acting Judge is actually an insane, handcuffs them to the window. All the truth is known to the maniac who actually happens to be a senior journalist (for some magazine) and a lady journalist who happened to come for talking for the same case. Finally, in a dramatic manner, the only inspector (who handcuffed others) is also handcuffed by the journalist on being threatened by the insane journalist with the bomb (which happened to be there). Now this senior reporter leaves leaving the bomb in the police station activated (which will blast in 30 seconds) asking the lady journalist to take the stand she thinks right - unlock the corrupt (criminal) officers or let them die..

Play shows both the climaxes.

(I) One where the lady journalist leaves the corrupt police officers there to die (a tough decision) where she leaves (spitting at the officers) and bomb blasts with all officers dead. Some audience clapped at this.

(II) Other where the lady journalist (being sensitive as we all are in the face of anyone's death) unlocks the police officers so that everyone can escape. But.. but police superintendent knows that this girl knows more than she should and asks his officers to handcuff this girl fast. and Officers escape to let the girl die.

End of the play has a scathing comment on our decision making which is superficial and hypocritic. It says - we, living in the country of Mahatma Gandhi have a hard time taking decisions like (I) and hence suffer daily from the incidents like (II) but had it been a country of Bhagat Singh, we would have certainly taken that decision with ease.

I agree but.. but when I think deeper into the problems I find it real hard to understand since corruption, crime, criminal mindset of police or administation, false journalism (we have concrete proof now from Uma Khurana case) are so complicated a structure that you (and you may be anything - a (honest or dishonest) businessman, an (honest or dishonest) administrative officer, a police officer, a judge, a politician, a corrupt journalist, an honest journalist, a father, a son.... just anthing), in an attempt to find the root or the end, find yourself caught in an infinite maze. Absolutely "No" solution exists since the quality of decision you make (whether to give in to corruption or not) is limited to the thinking part of the brain called cortex which is obviously not "something to choose". This is precisely the reason that unfair things exist. If everyone had superhuman intelligence (like Ramanujan or John Nash or Henry Poincare) then things would have been far easier. But it's not like that and hence things are "imperfect", decisions are "imperfect"... So today people use their intelligence for gains (yes, now economics in play) they can make.

A word about this play: Brilliant. I was less impressed with the dialogues at some segments but overall a fantastic play delivering the message perfectly.

A word about Arvind Gaur: He is an eminent face in theatre and heads the Delhi based theatre group 'Asmita'. He is committed towards innovative and socially relevant theatre. He has background in electronics but soon moved into Journalism. After working sometime for Electronic Media, he set up Asmita and has earned a reputation in India and Abroad.

A word about me and theatre: (especially for those who are astounded by this interest). Part of the audience. Recently (ahem.. few weeks back actually) had a chance visit to India Habitat Centre in regard to an Arts exhibition when I ended up attending the rehearsal of the play Court Martial by the same group. It was nothing less than excellent. That was the first ever theatre show I watched.

Asmita Theatre Group. Arvind Gaur. Indian Theatre Blog.

Book Review: The Black Swan

2007-10-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

I received The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as a gift from my friends. I've almost finished it (few final chapters left I'll be taking this weekend). Brilliant book uncovering the obvious (but often ignored) aspect of ignorance about the highly improbable events which have mammoth effect on the world. His earlier book too was a bestseller.

There are some good reviews over the web that I don't need to write anything {Too lazy (and insignificant)} except that this is one of those rare books and Taleb is one of those rare guys whom you would love rereading (inspite of oversarcasm sometimes).

A (really) fast forward through the book: What is a Black Swan?. Scalable professions and Globalization. Mediocristan and Extremistan (or mild and wild). Empirical treatment to science. Confirmation Bias. Narrative Fallacy (Causes of my rejection of causes) -- Theorizing (and rationalizing) in retrospect to explain the events. The sensational and the black swan. Human nature, Happiness and lumpy rewards. Silent Evidence Problem or survivorship bias. Uncertainity of the Nerd. The scandal of Prediction (about future blindness. Inadvertent (Serendipitous) discoveries (and why?). What do you do if you cannot predict? and much more.

_

Patternization of Coincidences which may not be coincidences

2007-09-28T05:27:00.000-07:00

Law of large numbers states that as the size of the sample of collected data increases, the average of observations converges towards the mean of the population.

With large enough sample (in any context), lot of interesting coincidences would result in it. Taking into account the inability of cortex to deal with large numbers (think grasping the power of compounding), we are astounded with the observations. Most of the time, we end up patternizing them as interesting facts (in retrospect obviously). Before discussing further I would like to discuss a post where similar patternization was done by a friend of mine (who also mentioned exceptions and who also soulfully understands that these are just interesting facts) Prashant where he discussed that "Successful and famous people somehow know each other long before they became famous". He gives some examples, few of them (and my stand)--

Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy were childhood buddy as they grew up in same neighborhood .One of them is CEO of Microsoft and other is Founder and [until recently ] CEO of SUN Microsystem . What was the probability of having two Key figures of PC and Computing Era coming out of same neighborhood ?

Substantial. Given that humans (normally) want to cohabitat in societies which match their social, financial and intellectual status so it's not surprising that parents of Steve and Scott resided in same neighbourhood (both were well off and inclined towards developing career) and I can infact add to it that if you try collecting more information (and increasing your sample) you will find that more people from the same neighbourhood achieved humongous success in life. (even more, if you move to their colleges - Harvard or Stanford -- no surprise). I blame myself for theorizing too in retrospect actually, and this may be (absolutely) a random event.

Mukesh Ambani and Steve Ballmar were class mate at Biz school .

Again, I don't find any surprise that two classmates at Stanford Business School reach the top offices (one was destined anyways).

Update: Reading his post again, found that I myself got victimized by confirmation bias by choosing only those examples which I can explain easily. There were other coincidences (still say they might be random events) more interesting like Dhirubhai knowing K V Kamath as a Bank Manager (later Dhirubhai became a tycoon and Kamath is the chairman of ICICI.

I really do not find anything against the thought that these are (now) interesting coincidences but patternization is invalid without taking into account people who were in touch with great people but could not turn into (or touch) greatness (aka failures as the societies love to call them although i believe (agreeing to NNT) heroes are heroes due to their deeds and not the results.)

In the discussions with him, he gave an interesting link to me about the similarities in life of Abraham Lincoln and J.F. Kennedy.

Document tells: two presidents with seven letters in their last names, and elected to office 100 years apart, 1860 and 1960. Both were assassinated on Friday in the presence of their wives, Lincoln in Ford's theater and Kennedy in an automobile made by the Ford motor company. Both assassins went by three names: John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, with fifteen letters in each complete name. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater, and Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and fled to a barn (a kind of warehouse). Both succeeding vice-presidents were southern Democrats and former senators named Johnson (Andrew and Lyndon), with thirteen letters in their names and born 100 years apart, 1808 and 1908.

Now what the document does not tell you is that Lincoln and Kennedy were born and died in different months, dates, and states, and neither date is 100 years apart. Their ages at death were different, as were the names of their wives. There are more examples of theorizing in retrospect to add a reason to the events that happen but sometimes it is just weird. Like, Uri Geller gave a list of "facts" relating the 9/11 anti american attack and the number 11 --

The date of the attack: 9/11 - 9 + 1 + 1 = 11
September 11th is the 254th day of the year: 2+5+4 = 11
Afghanistan - 11 Letters
The Pentagon - 11 Letters
Flight 11 - 92 on board - 9 + 2 = 11
State of New York - The 11th State added to the Union
New York City - 11 Letters
Twin Towers - standing side by side, looks like the number 11
Names that have eleven letters: Air Force One, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Saudi Arabia, ww terrorism, Colin Powell U.S. Secretary of State

An extract from Skeptic 's dictionary - Accumulating more findings like these coincidences between the number 11 and other things should be easy, since there are countless items that can be made to relate in some fashion to the number 11 (or 12, 13, or just about any other number or word). E.g. the country code for Pakistan is 92 (9+2=11), Nostradamus and Billy Graham have 11 letters, any word with 8 letters just put 'the' in front of it; any word with 9 letters, just put 'ww' or any two-letter word in front of it, any word with 10 letters, just put 'a' in front of it or add an s to the end of it, etc. It is especially easy to do this since there is no specific guide before we begin our hunt for amazing facts as to what will and what won't count as being relevant. We have a nearly boundless array of items that could count as hits.

Skeptic's dictionary puts some light into the confirmation bias that is used in such numerology tricks. They mention a list similar to one above of meaningless coincidences (how things related to the attack were unrelated to the number 11)

the planes hit a little before and a little after 9 am
there were 4 flights that crashed with 266 people in them; 2+6+6= 14
one plane was a 767 (7+6+7 = 20)
one tower was 1,362 feet high; 1+3+6+2 = 12
the other was 1,368; 1+3+6+8 = 18
Boston has 6 letters
Massachusetts has 13 letters
Pennsylvania has 12 letters
Washington D.C. has 12 letters
Los Angeles has 10 letters
The number of hijackers was 19 (9+1=10)
Names and words that don't have eleven letters in them: Osama bin Laden, Khalid Al-Midhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaq Alhamzi, Salem Alhamzi, Satam Al Suqami, Waleed M. Alshehri, Wail Alshehri, Abdulaziz Alomari, Dick Cheney, Laura Bush, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Muslim, Islam, Pentagon, World Trade Center, terrorism, jihad, Taliban, Koran, United States, anti-American, murder, fire, hell, stupid.

Tricks are amusing and interesting sometimes but turn into painful experiences when people get caught into wrong beliefs and follow things which are absolutely baseless (like praying for their kids whenever they encounter the number 11 during the day). Vexing play which is fun for the observer but may become onerous for others.

Summing up, I need to connect the "law of large numbers" I talked about and other part of the post (which is all messed up I think as I write) - when the population of the earth is in billions then even an highly improbable event like one occuring one in a million times is highly likely. So, even though we feel like that one person winning a lottery twice in his lifetime is a really unlikely event, it actually is not. Mathematics speaks, I don't. Same is the case with the occurence of other events which may be the randomness play confused as telepathy, coincidence, miracle or mysterious. It's all in the mind.
_

Sky Drive from Microsoft

2007-09-19T05:20:00.000-07:00

Skydrive is a new remote file storage service from Microsoft. It describes itself sparsely as --

Password-protected online file storage. Always available where you need it.

Service is cool in that it has three levels of access - personal, sharing with friends, sharing with the world (reminds me of unix.. ). My "experience" using it was "not so cool". Ajaxified code does make things good but since I've good internet speed available, my expectations would obviously rise. I'm talking about the delay during the processing of some Javascript code while signup (why?), while renaming folders, moving forward and back et cetera (and not about the upload time). Flickr/Youtube experience is largely better. You need a "hotmail" account to use this which you can create while signup. Another mentionable pain is that when you as a customer show interest to sign up for the service, you are shown another self-advertising (and more verbose) screen with two "red" buttons saying "try it" (what you clicked "signup" for ?.. was it a "know more" link wrongly texted as "sign up" ?) which you have to click to proceed. Sign up form could have been somewhat shorter. App looks good. Finally I could upload some ebooks onto my personal folder (will share them) and yes, while uploading I was not shown the hour glass (or some variant) but was asked to play with a jumping ball (innovative solution.. great if it is replaced with an interesting game or say ask user for their choice -- mind games or animation games or.. -- believe me, we may start loving upload process).

Anyways I am available (as awmanoj -- although no idea how to search for users with their username) on skydrive and would be sharing some cool books through it. Enjoi !

_

Silent Evidence or Survivorship bias or why (almost) every causal relationship you know is wrong (..incomplete) ?

2007-09-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

In The Black Swan, NNT (as he refers himself) talks about silent evidences (failure to count those who fail while discussing the causal relationship in success stories). An introductory story to the subject is interesting.

One Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, "Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned ?".

Those “drowned believers” are silent evidence. They are not taken into account because they can’t speak up for themselves. The kernel is that, “History is written by the winners.” In fact, it’s written by whoever happens to survive.

And unfortunately this is generalized into almost all spheres which deal with some sequence of events in posteriority and this story and further discussion in the book and elsewhere clear the haze of how everyone of us is being fooled by history (and how are we fooled into buying 'Ten steps to being Millionare' kind of books which are more perfect example of survivorship bias - these never count people who were hard working, disciplined, risk taking etcetera but still failed). Interesting.

Now, reading this you will certainly think (!) before trying your hands on pirated products...

2007-09-14T02:10:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it's a cruel punishment ..

A man convicted of illegally downloading an episode of Star Wars has been told that he can no longer use his computer with an Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Scott McCausland pleaded guilty last year to 'conspiracy to commit copyright infringement' and 'criminal copyright infringement' by downloading Star Wars: Episode III illegally.

He served five months in prison and is now on probation, but has been told that he cannot use his Linux computer.

"I had a meeting with my probation officer today and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me; that is part of my sentence," he wrote on his Lost and Alone blog.

"However, the [monitoring] software doesn't support GNU/Linux. So he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.

"Which basically means Microsoft and monitoring software or no computer. I use Ubuntu 7.04 now, and they are trying to force me to switch."

via : Now, I'm not in favor of piracy but...

Intelligent Searching

2007-09-10T07:32:00.000-07:00

No doubt that Google has become a de facto standard for internet search but I think it and other search services have to go few more steps to bridge the gap between humans and machines. Quality of search results today depends on the quality of keywords (words that are fed to the search programs) and quality of keywords is dependent on the intelligence of humans performing the search (taking into account search attempts for knowledge based searches and not for "names" of celebrities or buildings).

e.g. one of my friends searched for the following statement as-it-is on google "what happens when a woman consumes viagra" and supposedly the best search engine returned this. I had to refactor the keywords to "woman viagra effect" to get more relevant (and numerous) results. So google failed to understand what my friend meant -- the gap exists. Filling this gap to some extent (in my humble opinion) would not require a bravura research. Just asking (as a consumer) to make it a two level process -- understanding what user means to say and then mapping this understanding to higher quality keywords -- an application of Natural Language Processing and Machine learning (both subfields of Artificial Intelligence).

This should be on the priorities especially when internet umbrella is expanding to cover the outlier age groups (smaller and older people who I suppose look at search engines with more light in the eyes) so that things happen for them automa-g-ically.

_

Long (Movies) Weekend

2007-09-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

Movie Review: Anacondas, The hunt for the blood orchid

Movie arose my interest as I was moved by the quality of cinematographic advances from the first of the movies on Anacondas that I watched (anaconda, 1990s).A major motivation factor in watching such movies is the adventure and fear you want to feel. Ferreting out some short sequences towards the climax, you never feel the fear. Movie scores bad on cinematography and on background score. Story is about a pharmaceutical research team going for a expedition to Africa for a botanical species which can be revolutionary for pharmaceuticals. They hire a (small) ship and meet through a shipwreck (which completely destroys their ship. While wandering for survival one of the friends is engulfed by an Anaconda (a large snake). These guys decide about leaving the expedition (and living) but an ambitious member of the team doesn't want it (and to the extent that he doesn't mind getting his colleague killed in the procesS - not directly, but by paralyzing him through an insect) and flee to complete the expedition by himself. Movie climax is what it should be, this bad guy (the ambitious member) gets killed almost the same way (getting paralyzed through same insect and getting engulfed by an anaconda). Rest of the guys live. Not a remarkable movie on storyline as well. There is nothing in the movie to watch (although watching once won't be a pain I can say).

Movie Review: Vertigo - 1958 (Alfred Hitchcock Collection)

Alfred Hitchcock was a master at suspense and thrillers but this one is not an extraordinary one. Story is about a private detective who suffers from Vertigo (just as a matter of fact, I too suffer from it and hence interest to watch a movie with the same name was even more) who gets caught into a task where he has to follow a friend's wife. His friend suspects that his wife has some dead woman inside her and she has started behaving strangely. In the meantime, the detective falls in love with this girl. There are suicidal tendencies in this woman and he ends up watching her die from a church tower (he could not save again since he had a phobia off height). It's really hard for this guy to forget her since one, he was in love with her badly and second, he was guilty conscious (to complicate the things). One day to his surprise he sees the same girl somewhere but she refuses to recognize him. Finally movie ends up solving the mystery and he finds that it was all a part of the plot by his friend to kill his (his friend's) wife without being suspected and this girl was not actually his wife (to the happiness of our hero) .. kewl.

Indian viewers might be getting a sense of deja-vu if they watched the comedy "Bhaagam Bhaag" by Priyadarshan which has almost same plot filmed (copied).

Book Review: The Undercover Economist

2007-09-02T03:00:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been intrigued by questions like why we pay so much for coffee, especially in key locations such as railway stations and who profits most from it ? or why a good second-hand car is almost impossible to find and why organic bananas are never displayed next to normal ones on a supermarket shelf ? or why instead of giving away products for 5% discount throughout the year, they are on a 50% sale for two seasons (end seasons sale) ? If yes, Meet Tim Harford through his book The Undercover Economist. If no, am sure you're now thinking on these questions so continue.

When visiting a book store and accidentally (unplanned) getting through a book, I decide about whether to buy a book mostly the way most of us do i.e. by looking at the review comments on the back of the book and by looking at the Table of contents. I know that all these comments are mere advertisement of the book and publisher would not put it there if that is not going to propel the sale but I still get some insight into the contents of the book. For this book, you can start reading the preface and you would see the value of money into it.

The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford is a concise book on economics which is so full of life due to the witty and interesting factual examples. A brilliant book on a subject that has a reputation of being too technical (and boring and dizzying). He has stripped off all economics jargon from the book and hence makes a good read for even a naive. It is a must for even those who have taken Economics course but could never understand how to apply it in understanding the dynamics of the real world.

A perfect recommendation. And yes, you don't need to know anything about core economics to understand this book and after reading it you would end up knowing quite a lot economics.

This book is different from Freakonomics (Steven D Levitt) in that Freakonomics deals with an analysis of outliers and discrepancies and treatment of Economics is more academic while this book puts light on more practical aspect of Economics in understanding how it applies to the functioning of the world.

Another book on my shelf which I would be reading again and again.

Resolve to !

2007-08-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

I resolve to (start and) finish The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford) this weekend. Wish me luck. ;-)

Working On Low Self Esteem

2007-08-24T04:59:00.000-07:00

Just stumbled upon an article on how to work on low self esteem. I, myself have been a serious victim of this few years back (when I was starting my career), and I find the thoughts written by the author so organized and in resonance with the guy I consulted then. A summary of steps -

1) Stop comparing yourself with other people. There will always be some people who have more than you and some who have less. If you play the comparison game, you'll run into too many "opponents" you can't defeat.

2) Stop putting yourself down. You can't develop high self-esteem if you repeat negative phrases about yourself and your abilities. Whether speaking about your appearances, your career, your relationships, your financial situation, or any other aspects of your life, avoid self-deprecating comments.

3) Accept all compliments with "thank you." Ever received a compliment and replied," Oh, it was nothing." When you reject a compliment, the message you give yourself is that you are not worthy of praise. Respond to all compliments with a simple Thank You."

4) Use affirmations to enhance your self-esteem. On the back of a business card or small index card, write out a statement such as "I like and accept my self." or "I am valuable, lovable person and deserve the best in life." Carry the card with you. Repeat the statement several times during the day, especially at night before going to bed and after getting up in the morning. This really (really) works.

5) Take advantage of workshops, books and cassette tape programs on self-esteem. Whatever material you allow to dominate mind will eventually take root and affect your behavior. I prefere reading books (in alignment with my hobby).

6) Associate with positive, supportive people. When you are surrounded by negative people who constantly put you and your ideas down, your self-esteem is lowered. On the other hand, when you are accepted and encouraged, you feel better about yourself in the best possible environment to raise your self-esteem.

7) Make a list of your past successes. This doesn't necessarily have to consist of monumental accomplishments. It can include your "minor victories," like learning to skate, graduating from high school, receiving an award or promotion, reaching a business goal, etc. Read this list often.

8) Make a list of your positive qualities. Are you honest? Unselfish? Helpful? Creative? Be generous with yourself and write down at least 20 positive qualities. Again, it's important to review this list often.

9) Start giving more. I'm not talking about money. Rather, I mean that you must begin to give more of yourself to those around your. When you do things for others, you are making a positive contribution and you begin to feel more valuable, which, in turn, lifts your spirits and raises your own self-esteem. Help and feel (Don't confuse with "show") it !

10) Get involved in work and activities you love. It's hard to feel good about yourself if your days are spent in work you despise. Self-esteem flourishes when you are engaged in work and activities that you enjoy and make you feel valuable. Love Art ? Give time to it. I do.

11) Be true to yourself. Live your own life - not the life others have decided is best for you. You'll never gain your own respect and feel good about yourself if you aren't leading the life you want to lead. If you're making decisions based on getting approval from friends and relatives, you aren't being true to yourself and your self-esteem is lowered.

12) Take action! You won't develop high self-esteem if you sit on the sidelines and back away from challenges. When you take action - regardless of the ensuing result - you feel better about yourself. When you fail to move forward because of fear and anxiety, you'll be frustrated and unhappy - and you will undoubtedly deal a damaging blow to your self-esteem.

Another thing I would add to the list is - just think on solutions to problems with sincerety, share them without the fear of being rejected, execute them without the fear of being a failure, learn from them and keep the learning forever (that's the way you mature). My personal experience shows that I used to hesitate in quoting my mind (mostly thinking that what is on my minds *may be* too primitive or trivial [mostly it is not]) - had this problem be with Newton we would possibly be unaware of "gravity" and whole theory behind it. Get Rid of it. Speak what's on your mind - whatever be the platform - interview room, negotiation table, business conference, family discussions, friends gossip or talking to your girlfriend (or would be). Now I am more in self control. Thanks again to the Author for this wonderful article.

_

When will you be a millionaire ?

2007-08-23T04:40:00.000-07:00

This millionare calculator helps you calculate the time you will take to be a member of the millionaire club (reach that magic figure of $1,000,000). Adjust the tax rates according to your domestic tax laws.

perseverance

2007-08-23T02:25:00.000-07:00

I get asked this a lot and I have a pretty standard answer which is, a lot of people come to me and say "I want to be an entrepreneur". And I go "Oh that's great, what's your idea?". And they say "I don't have one yet". And I say "I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you're really passionate about because it's a lot of work".I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don't blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.

- Steve Jobs in 1995

_

FileHippo

2007-08-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

File Hippo is one stop website for downloading free software. Congregation- putting things together is one thing most needed when there is so much information and for free software downloads (with categorization), these guys have done the task.

Movie Review: Pyar ke side effects

2007-08-15T08:52:00.000-07:00

An excellent movie indeed. Rahul Bose is an extremely talented actor (apart from being one of the few no-nonsense actors in the Industry) and has done a great job in the role of a lover struggling to understand his beloved (and himself). I loved the narrative presentation of the movie (different things always appeal to me) where Rahul talks to Camera. Mallika Sherawat looked good (even when fully clothed surprisingly[wink]) and does justice to her role too. Ranvir Shourey always impressed me with the level of commitment with which he acts and sounds really promising. Quality of comedy in the movie is simply fabulous. Saket Choudhary's direction deserves a pat. Movie has the stuff and I highly recommend it.

Happy Independence Day

2007-08-14T07:41:00.000-07:00

"Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity."

- Jawaharlal Nehru (Tryst with Destiny Speech)

On the eve of the day, wish you a very happy Independence day.

(Angry) Inhuman Delhi

2007-08-06T23:53:00.000-07:00

I do not have any idea about the change that has happened but one thing is for sure that Delhi is becoming more inhumane. I hear about road rages leading to human life loss more often now (if concentrate my sample to last few weeks then average would be probable one every single day). These road rages include normal accidents, abnormal accidents (from bluelines - calling it abnormal since they happen despite of so much debate over them - who is to care?) and (the most inhuman one) beating up the victim to (near) death (on so minor accidents that i (really) would never care about) . People who are caught in these acts of beating to death are not criminals and that is the sad part. This implies how unsafe are people on road. Who is to come to rescue ? Where is the "Dilwaalon ki Dilli" ? Probably on Radio stations only !

I think personal security should be the key priority in coming future. (should be on the minds of the governments and political parties too).

> Mob Psychology

_

Bystander Problem - Mob Psychology

2007-07-29T23:00:00.000-07:00

Few days back I wrote about my confusions regarding an incident in which a lover stabbed his girl friend to death and tried committing suicide after that (or planned so) in a street which was crowded and no one came to the help of the poor girl. Surprise was more on the psychology of mob which kept watching and did not get in to save the life.

This weekend while reading "Tipping Point" (by Malcolm Gladwell), came through the discussion about the mob psychology. It mentions a (very) similar incident where a woman was chased and attacked three times over a street in New york city for around half an hour. There were thirty eight witnesses to the incident, none of whom turned in to call police. Two psychologists from New York, Bibb Latane and John Darley,later conducted a series of studies and tried to find out what they dubbed as "bystander problem". Following is an extract discussing one of the experiments that they did -

"They staged emergencies of one kind or the other... In one such experiment they left a student alone in a room stage an epileptic fit. When there was just one person next door, listening, that person rushed to the student's aid 85% of the time. But when subject thought there were four others also overhearing the seizure, they came to help only 31% of the time..."

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will make the call or that because no one else is acting, the apparant problem is not actually a problem. So this is is not completely attributable to urbanization and hence requires more than self-retrospection. Requires that we as an individiual realize about the fact and take the responsibility to do it on our own, be a leader in aiding people when they require so. This will require us to move away from "mob", get away from mob mentality.

_

Scalable Professions

2007-07-17T05:50:00.000-07:00

Software Products or Services !

lot of debate and i would add my two cents here. I support software product development and believe that this has less probability but more potential to make it big. Reasoning behind the thought is "scalability". Software product development is scalable and Services are not.

To develop a product (a software product), you require manpower, time and the capital. Now once the product reaches a stage where it is stable, sufficiently robust and "feature-rich" (and has customers), you do not need to spend (sorry, you just-need-to-spend) a dime on it. This is the beauty. your first copy of software requires some "capital" (and time and effort) and then you can "scale" with (comparably) almost no money (and no time and no effort).

Now, this is not the case with services. suppose you start with a BPO (or KPO) operations, and hire 200 really smart professionals who help some "n" customers. Now if you get to reach and provide your services tomorrow to "2n" customers, you will require to double your workforce. No scalability.

But, its not all sunny with software products development company.

A close discussion (and a more generic one) will be the comparison of the "professions" that are scalable and those that are not.

Following (partial) extract is from "The Black Swan" by Taleb (which sparked the thoughts above) -

".. some professions, such as dentists, consultants or massage professionals, cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients or clients you can see in a given period of time ... your revenue depends on yourcontinuous efforts more than on the quality of your decisions ... this kind of work is largely predicatable..."

".. a profession that is scalable, that is one in which you are not paid by the hour .. that allow you to add zeroes to your output (and your income), if you do well, at little or no extra effort.. being an idea person.. "

for example, a wall street trader would require 'almost' equal amount of time to decide about placing thousands of orders or a hundreds of thousands of orders.

But author warns us against the scalable professions. He says that these professions are good only if you are successful; they are more competitive, produce monstrous inequalities, and are far more random with huge disparities between efforts and rewards. There are a small number of giants and a large number of dwarfs in such professions. Examples may include authors, traders, music stars etc. (and a software product entrepreneur).

mediocrity (being into a non-scalable profession) is not glamorous but when observed collectively for a substantial amount of time, results into huge (really huge) (but slow) gains.

While closing this post, I would like to put down thoughts from the author and to which I (and my friends) agreed always as to why the "low quality" work is being outsourced to India (in particular) -

".. And globalization has allowed the United States to specialize in the creative aspects of the things, the production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable part of the products, and, increasingly by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable components and assign them to those happy to be paid by hour.."

My stand is still "for software product development" because there are far many "variables" in play other than "luck" and "randomness" (which Taleb gives lot of emphasis, and I am convinced and/or impressed) which will decide about whether you "win" or "lose".

_

Battle against Poverty

2007-07-13T03:21:00.000-07:00

Google for "eliminating poverty" and first link that you get is an interesting link.

Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank in Dhaka, Bangladesh wrote this article about Eliminating Poverty. I heard about the unique business model of the bank sometime back - how it helped poor people get loan without a collateral and how it has a 99% repayment rate and now amazed (and happy) that the bank is profitable. It has given rise to another concept of banking called "microcredit".

Things that "will" help in halving the poverty by 2015 according to him -

widening the concept of employment. move towards self employment.
ensure that financial services are available even to poorest person.
recognize that every single human being is a potential entrepreneur.
"social entrepreneurs" can be the potential agents for creating a better world.

some facts/incidents from the article:

"..I was shocked to discover a woman borrowing US $0.25 under the condition that the lender would have the exclusive right to buy all she produced at the price the lender decided! What a way to recruit slave labor. I decided to make a list of the victims of this money-lending ‘business’ in the village next door to our university campus. When my list was done it had the names of 42 victims. The total amount they borrowed was US $27! What a lesson for an economics professor who was teaching his students about the Bangladesh Five Year Development Plan with billions of dollars in investments to help the poor..."

"Several years later I decided to create a separate bank for the poor, to give loans without collateral. Finally in 1983 I succeeded in doing that. I named it Grameen Bank, or village bank. It now works all over Bangladesh, giving loans to more than 4 million poor people, 96% of whom are women. The bank is owned by its
borrowers. Over the past two decades, the bank has loaned a total of more than US $4.8 billion. Generally the repayment rate has been nearly 99%. The Grameen Bank makes profits, and financially it is self-reliant."

"Impact studies done on the Grameen Bank by independent researchers find that 5% of borrowers come out of poverty every year, children are healthier, education and nutrition levels are higher, housing conditions are better, child mortality has declined by 37%, the status of women has been enhanced, and the ownership of assets by poor women, including housing, has improved dramatically. "

"Grameen-type microcredit has spread around the world over the last two decades. Nearly 100 countries have Grameen-type microcredit programs."

Indian Startup Tracker

2007-07-11T01:02:00.000-07:00

Rahul Roy-Chowdhery has created Indian Startup Tracker. It's simple. It's good. It's useful too. Details about how to edit this (and why he preferred google spreadsheet to a Wiki) are here.

_

Shift happens !

2007-07-11T00:31:00.000-07:00

This presentation just won the "World's Best Presentation Contest" organized by SlideShare. See the socio-economic and technological shifts that happen.

I, all of a sudden, can link many different sources and how they congregate into one - its really hard to predict things and harder to do so looking in retrospect. [Yes, lately have been reading "Taleb" a lot. ]

[update]
Guy Kawasaki writes something on the presentation contest. See the characteristics of a good presentation at the end of the article. Interesting trend change.

_

Family

2007-07-06T00:10:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon this poem through a blog and loved it.

I ran into a stranger as he passed by,"Oh excuse me please" was my reply.
He said, "Please excuse me too;I wasn't watching for you."
We were very polite, this stranger and I.
We went on our way and we said good-bye.
But at home a different story is told,
How we treat our loved ones, young and old.
Later that day, cooking the evening meal,
My son stood beside me very still.
When I turned, I nearly knocked him down.
"Move out of the way," I said with a frown.
He walked away, his little heart broken.
I didn't realize how harshly I'd spoken.
While I lay awake in bed,God's still small voice came to me and said,
"While dealing with a stranger,common courtesy you use,
but the family you love, you seem to abuse.
Go and look on the kitchen floor,
You'll find some flowers there by the door.
Those are the flowers he brought for you.
He picked them himself: pink, yellow and blue.
He stood very quietly not to spoil the surprise,
you never saw the tears that filled his little eyes."
By this time,I felt very small and now my tears began to fall.
I quietly went and knelt by his bed;"Wake up, little one, wake up" I said.
"Are these the flowers you picked for me?" He smiled,
"I found 'em, out by the tree.
I picked 'em because they're pretty like you.
I knew you'd like 'em, especially the blue."
I said, "Son, I'm very sorry for the way I acted today;
I shouldn't have yelled at you that way."
He said, "Oh, Mom, that's okay.I love you anyway."
I said, "Son, I love you too and I do like the flowers, especially the blue."

Writing Robust Code For Good

2007-06-30T04:05:00.000-07:00

Being into the profession of software writing for some time and seen a few software products, I've come to realize the importance of writing robust and secure code. Insecure and untidy unit of code with lot many obvious bugs attributes either to an inexperienced programmer who has incomplete knowledge of his tools or a careless programmer who is unaware of the mandatory good practices of writing software (and who should be kicked out asap). When it comes to a complex product then reason may not be any of the given, it may result from two many cooks being involved in which case a lot of discipline needs to be put to get things done - that includes an specification for every damn thing e.g. a detailed and complete coding guidelines document, a detailed document on the particular architecture being followed and believed (this is really important since lot many new hires want to stick to their own work experiences and have hard time. humans by their basic nature dislike changes) , a frequently updated document with the Dos and Don'ts while designing, coding or testing the software etc.

As for the qualities of the code that is robust and secure there are so many good docs written by likes of Eric S Raymond that I cannot add a new thing to the -check- list.

But I still believe that your code : -

should be well thought and designed
should be neatly written (as for humans to understand)
should be commented (comment not how you do but what and why and only when it's not trivial)
should follow the coding guidelines of the employer and must not look like an alien code
must be tested at boundary conditions
must be checked for off-by-one cases (if applicable)
[ off-by-one errors are one of the most severe holes in security ]
must never crash

A word about the code design/architecture : -

design should avoid any redundancy
design should be comprehensive enough to map it to low level cleanly

Some final words about code : -

code be such that there are reusable components
code should be extensible
components should have clean interfaces and messaging

I believe if you program defensively and think twice before writing code then you will almost always come up with the quality code which is robust and secure. So programing defensively is one key item in the to-do list.

one good design architecture that I just got introduced to (yet to go into the specifications) is Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) which lets you create extensible and robust applications.

_

Fantastic Pictures

2007-06-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

Slideshare is undoubtedly a great platform for social sharing of presentations. Following I got through while browsing through it. Fantastic Pictures.

_

shame on us

2007-06-25T02:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday there was a news that ran almost whole day on almost all prominent news channels about a `lover' stabbing his `beloved' in public because `.. she defied him..'. there were several threads simultaneously going on in my mind -

* Pyschology of the guy who wanted to kill his girl friend and then commit suicide. shame on such love !!
* Psychology of the mob silently viewing the incident, not having the courage to get into and save the life. this is disgusting. shame not on the administration but on `Indians' who never stop boasting about their culture and courage. shame on society !!
* Psychology of photographers/cameramen who captured the photographs of girl `being stabbed' and got to help her only when the guy was gone and she was severely injured. shame on media !!

Time for retrospection into ourselves to have an idea of where the hell are we moving towards.

_

Why NOT to be an entrepreneur ?

2007-06-22T04:34:00.000-07:00

Marc Andreessen writes about reasons why not to start a startup. Reasons come from his own experiences.

One of the problems that entrepreneurs face is building the team (Hiring). Following is an excerpt from the article regarding the same -

You will be amazed how many windowshoppers you'll deal with.

A lot of people think they want to be part of a startup, but when the time comes to leave their cushy job at HP or Apple, they flinch -- and stay.

An interesting, informative and eye opening story. But it does just that, it does not demoralize. !
_

We don't quite know what we are talking about when we are talking about 'volatile'

2007-06-07T04:47:00.000-07:00

volatile usage is mostly talked on at Interview points and computer science quizzes and answers comes as `when a data can be changed in manner not determined by compiler mark the data as volatile'. It is true but a more accurate and precise answer would be `volatile is used to disable any compiler optimization while accessing the data marked as volatile'.

Confusion is also in difference between volatile and synchronization primitives. A nice discussion about the definition and details is here.

* [Update] An interesting and insightful discussion on volatile. [Thanks to Maneesh/Amit]

Note: Title motivated (term used for copying shamelessly) from an unrelated blog entry by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Movie Review: Forrest Gump

2007-05-30T04:19:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gump is one movie I would recommend everyone. A masterpiece to watch. Movie is all about the life of a character - Forrest Gump who has a below average IQ. There is a lot to watch movie for. I wished to write a lengthy review for the movie but found this review so complete that I decided to continue being a good reuser (good software engineer i am). Run Forrest Run !!

Wikipedia entry of Forrest Gump. Interesting stuff is the integration of fiction with history.

Do's and Don'ts in starting a business

2007-05-26T23:19:00.000-07:00

My Own Business mentions a list of Do's and Don'ts while starting a business: -

# Do's

Live frugally and begin saving up money for starting your business.
Learn your intended business by working for someone else in the same business first.
Consider the benefits of starting a moonlight business.
Consider the advantages of operating a family business.
Objectively measure your skills and training against potential competition.
Consider subcontracting to low cost suppliers if you're manufacturing a product.
Test market your product or service before starting or expanding.
Make "for" and "against" list describing the specific business you are considering.
Talk to lots of people in your intended business for advice.
Make a comparative analysis of all opportunities you are considering.

# Don'ts

Think about leaving your job before you have completed start-up plans.
Consider starting a business in a field you do not enjoy.
Risk all the family assets. Limit your liabilities to a predetermined amount.
Compete with your employer in a moonlight business.
Hurry to select a business. There is no penalty for missed opportunities.
Select a business that is too high a risk or hurdle. Go for the two-foot hurdle.
Select a business in which you must have the lowest price to succeed.
Ignore the negative aspects of an intended business.
Permit self-confidence to outweigh careful diligence.
Allow the promise of a conceptual high reward deter reality testing first.

Book Review: Purple Cow

2007-05-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

Purple cow is a book by Seth Godin. I've been a fan of Godin since I subscribed his blog. His belief and the way he presents them are fascinating. In the book, he urges everyone to innovate at every point of the business. Be remarkable is the mantra for success, he says. Being safe is risky. Book is full of case studies and examples which make it more interesting, motivating and lively.

Some points from the book -

* Make a remarkable product
* Market it to early adopters (Customers who love experimentation)
* Have short cycles and big changes
* Ideas that spread win (concept of ideavirus)
* Do not try to sell to everyone.

My recommendation. A must read.

Note: Term `early adopters' taken from Moore's `idea diffusion curve' from his book `crossing the chasm' (on my to-read list).

Motivation

2007-05-13T06:56:00.000-07:00

When we feel like missing a purpose in life, what actually is missing is not the purpose but the motivation. yes, motivation. Motivation is what sets the things go round and round in this world.

I've read stories of mother's lifting the car in order to save their child when they met through an accident and she had to save her child. Motivation is what is behind the miracles. Motivation is what makes people innovate. Motivation is the common ingredient of success. Motivation makes people win.

.. and to be motivated, I think selfish goals are never sufficient. To earn a lot of money is never strong enough a motivation to keep you up and running under the stress and pressure of setting up a business. To have a peaceful life is never enough motivation to leave a peaceful life now (yes, job life is quite peaceful) and set for a journey where there are unknowns.

I think bigger goals like changing the world with your innovation or changing the face of the society or raising the life of poor and weak sections may prove to be a better source of motivation and that can actually keep you motivated throughout life. This will be a life of purpose.

Sitting in the lawns of National Association for the Blind (and after a long time enjoying swing ride [happy] ), I've been looking at students and employees there, who inspite of their disabilities, are smiling and working enthusiastically. I am also thinking of the ways in which I can help them. I believe that software is playing and can play a very important role in bridging the gap between sightful and visually impaired people. Accessibility is the key.

Well, I was talking about Motivation. I was missing Motivation in my life. I now think that there is enough. You just need to open up your minds (not eyes, because I've just seen how blinds also dream. Minds dream and not eyes). This part of the world (NAB, RK Puram) looks so beautiful.

NAB was established in 1952 by Mangulal Jethalal Shah with a determination to establish NAB as the icon of unlimited service to the blind. Hats off to the man ! These people are the heroes.

[ from a page written while being at NAB, RK Puram, New Delhi ]

20 things not to do before starting a Business

2007-04-22T22:12:00.000-07:00

Dane Carlson tells about the 20 things not to do before starting a business. I will surely be keeping in mind most of these.

stumbleupon

2007-04-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

Stumbleupon is a cool startup which describes itself on the home page in three lines (thanks to Paul Graham for this culture) -

Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.

Loving it. you can join here.

A Programming Desiderata

2007-04-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Strive for elegance. An elegant algorithm is not only easier to understand, but it is very often more efficient as well. If your code meanders all over the page and takes hours to deconstruct, you can do better.

If they complain, build it

2007-04-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

Rosen Sharma speaks

... the more the customer complain, the more you should build the product

Why I fell in love with Ruby

2007-04-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

I am adventurous as far as exploration of languages is concerned. My most recent update on this front has been introduction to Ruby. A language which has become my favorite . Here I write why -

* object oriented. scripting language. fast is better for me (development).

* Syntax of the language is not noisy `lexically' (like C/C++) nor too sparse (like LISP, which I did not continue just due to this). It has less synonymnical constructs. C/C++ has a plenty of it e.g. a[1], 1[a], *(a+1), *++a all point to the second element of array `a'.

* consistency of the control structures. In this case, Ruby has a construct which clearly defines the blocks using start and end statements. This is odd for people swimming deep into C/C++ who prefer their lovely braces but good for novice. I especially hate the use of indentation to identify code blocks (think python). dirty.

* Excellent concept of `yield' and blocks. If you are not aware of this, please google and read about it. This feature saves you a lot of coding (.. and I know how lazy developers are). e.g. remember implementation of iterators for containers in C/C++ or Java and have a peek over Ruby code for iteration over an array and its all due to this beauty keyword

a.each { |x| print x }

So, full points to semantics.

* No hardware dependence for the size of data types. Aren't you fed up of keeping a note that your machine is 16 bit or 32 bit just to keep your code handle the overflow cases ? Well, freedom now.

* Level of abstraction that soothes. Availability of a lot of open source helps the pragmatic approach with which the language was designed.

* Finally, a language written for humans.

About Me: Myself a newbie to Ruby. Have an amateur interest in Ruby which I am planning to make a bit professional through open source projects and digging into the language. I, few days back, bought the Ruby Cookbook which I am planning to start soon. You can read an old version of the book online.

I am yet to explore the Ruby and once I get acquainted to it better, I will probably be writing a more vivid explanations for the title.

blogging करें हिंदी में !

2007-04-13T04:25:00.000-07:00

अब में अपनी मातृभाषा में blogging कर सकता हूँ। और यह सब संभव हुआ है blogger के transliteration feature के कारण जो कि बेहद सरल है।

मेरे मित्र मनीश ने मुझे एक अंग्रेजी शबद से अव्गात्र भी कराया - paraskavedekatriaphobia

इसका अर्थ तो आपको ऊपर वाले link से ही पता चलेगा और यह भी जान पाओगे की उस्ने मुह्जे यह शब्द आज क्यों बताया।

लेकिन चलते चलते एक बार मैं फिर से कह दूँ की यह blogger का यह feature अत्यंत cool है।

मेरी गलतियों को माफ़ कीजियेगा । मैं अभी इस तरीके से वाकिफ हो रहा हूँ ।

Saving is Sin; Spending is Virtue;

2007-04-12T04:01:00.000-07:00

Neo economists justify the growth of US economy to the spending habits of Americans. Claim is that `saving is sin, spending is virtue' for nation's growth. An extract -

The world is dependent on US consumption for its growth. By its deepening culture of consumption, the US has habituated the world to feed on US consumption. But as the US needs money to finance its consumption, the world provides the money. It's like a shopkeeper providing the money to a customer so that the customer keeps buying from the shop. If the customer will not buy, the shop won't have business, unless the shopkeeper funds him. The US is like the lucky customer. And the world is like the helpless shopkeeper financier.

Complete article here.