Posts

Showing posts from May, 2008

Learning the ropes

A beautiful quote from a interview taken from an interview of Sean Johnson published by Coffee with Sunder . Beyond a CS degree there are some obvious skills you need such as the ability to present to customers and at industry conferences. But more than a specific skill set, you need to develop a base of knowledge. You need to spend time with the sales organization learning how a deal progresses from an email address of a prospect to a closed deal 9 months later. You need to spend time with marketers to understand how hard and expensive it is to generate a quality lead. You need to spend time with quality assurance and support teams to understand the ramifications of ill defined features. You need to spend time with software executives to learn how a software business operates, how contracts are negotiated for example or how a partnership is put together. You need to learn the domain that your product is in and become something very close to a domain expert in it. You need to know yo...

POD is to Self-Publishing what Free is to Music

The concept of self publishing is as old as books. Before the advent of modern publishing companies, people ended up publishing and distributing their own work. It is said that the publishing industry has remained more or less the same since Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing in 15th century. Of course the printing presses have become increasingly sophisticated with the advance of technology, but the basic model has remained the same. This model can print many copies of a book quickly and cheaply once a certain amount of time has been invested in setting up the type. With the advent of mass market retailing in 20th century, this technology proved to be just the right match : print in bulk, distribute, return the unused, destroy. Books are printed in runs of few thousands and distributed to offline stores which can return back the unused copies later. The minimum number of copies required to make this process work ( to generate a profit for everybody along the chain) ...

दो अधूरी कवितायें

दो कवितायें। दोनो ही कुछ अधूरी सी पर जिन अहसासों से वो निकलीं थीं वो अब अपनी ताज़गी खो चुके हैं और इसलिये इनके पूरा हो पाने की ज्यादा उम्मीद शेष नही है। अतः जो कुछ भी है, हाज़िर है। १) पूरब रवि तत्पर आने को, पश्चिम मे विधु ढल जाने को, धूमिल पडते जाते तारे, जग से अंधियारा भाग रहा । कल रात नयन से निद्रा का एक पल को मिलना हुआ नही, पलकों मे बन्द रहीं आंखें, मन का दरवाज़ा खुला रहा। कोई बुला रहा ! २) हर एक दिल मे हमें दर्द बेहिसाब मिला , जब भी आंख खुली, चूर चूर ख्वाब मिला । सवाल जब भी उठे इश्क़ के, मोहब्बत के, हर इक निगाह से एक टका सा जवाब मिला । मिला इतना अभागा, भर गया दामन मेरा, गगन मिला, ज़मीं मिली, तुम्हारा साथ मिला ।

Barak Obama's Speech on Race

I happened to watch today the speech by Barak Obama that he delivered shortly after the controversy about the comments made by his former pastor broke out. A more perfect union . I must agree that it is a nice speech. He takes sometime to warm up, to get into the groove but then he is very fluent and impressive. Race is a very tochy issue and I am not familiar with the noraml political commentry on the subject in US. He delicately builds up his argument and sounds pretty convincing. At one point of time during the speech he said that an easier thing to do would have been to simply denounce Rev. Wright but he is not doing that. I don't quite agree. I don't think that was a path available to him considering his strong black constituency. His strong point is not that he made a choice to walk the right path, he was pretty much forced to do so. The thing I liked was when pushed on the path, he walks it courageously, with confidence and comes out on top, turning what could have been...