Basket Case

While the media initially went all gaga over the new Rupee symbol which somehow seems to have pushed us into an "elite" club, the reports have started coming in that it will be a while before the symbol gets into regular usage. Anyone with interest in Indian language computing is well aware of the fractured state of the Unicode usage. Most of the media houses still use a proprietary font for their content. Even govt uses many incompatible fonts in the data created by it. Result is a typical " जल बिच मछली प्यासी" situation. Even though large amounts of text is available in digital format, it is useless for a lot of purposes. A lot of people cannot view it properly without installing tons of fonts, it cannot be searched or indexed and it is useless for most computing purposes. Lack of huge amount of digital text is one major problem hampering research in NLP for Indian languages. With the introduction of Rupee symbol, the situation can become even worse. First it ...

Inaugural issue of Pothiz - a new free online magazine is now available on Pothi.com !  Jaya  is the force behind this one. I am also trying to write a story for the next issue - a sci-fi epic :-D. Entries are due by 16th July. Let's see how far you can continue to write code and story without mixing them up too much!

What is a Facebook Vanity URL? Facebook vanity url is a url like http://www.facebook.com/pothidotcom which is shorter and easier to remember as compared to the default http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pothicom/18749584929?ref=mf How can you set it up for your page? It took me a bit of searching to find this but you just need to visit http://www.facebook.com/username and you can setup vanity urls for all your pages.

After about one year of having used the VPS based on Ubuntu Jaunty, recently I had the need to go look at my Apache logs. Now Apache log on my desktop machine are always nicely rotated by logrotate without me having to do anything. However on the server, I found a gigantic 1.2 GB other_vhosts_access.log staring at me with no rotation whatsoever in last 1 year. So I began to learn about logrotate. Running logrotate by hand produced the following which was obviously not true. abhaya@www$ sudo logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf rotating pattern: /var/log/apache2/*.log weekly (52 rotations) empty log files are not rotated, old logs are removed considering log /var/log/apache2/access.log log does not need rotating considering log /var/log/apache2/error.log log does not need rotating considering log /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log log does not need rotating The contents of the status file (/var/lib/logrotate/status) which logrotate uses to determine which log files need ...

Why is it that while as a customer anyone can recommend or not recommend my company to others but as a company/provider, I cannot recommend or not recommend a customer to other companies? Think about it! A registry of PITA customers who are not only going to waste your time, but also going to blame you for it! Over 1.5 years of Pothi.com, I have interacted with so many wonderful people both as customers, as people who believe in us and people who have been constructively critical. Without them we may not have even lasted so long - they supported us and told us that we were useful when our output was very raw and crude. They pointed fingers and poked holes which helped us improve. It is for all those nice people that I feel this strong urge to single out the jerks and show them for what they are. We love our customers and see them as our partners. We plan our activities with them, take their suggestions quite seriously and want to succeed with them. Right now I am trying hard to not let...

Recently MVP guys started this meme on Twitter which asks #whyamientrepreneur ? I am sure every entrepreneur at one time or the other has asked him/herself this question. Some ask it even before they start, while others ask it when they are considering quitting. Either way the answers which come out are quite eye opening - a wide range of reasons bring people to startups. Somebody wanted to create jobs, somebody just wanted to break free from artificial restrictions imposed by the system. Others wanted to be their own boss. All of these are very inspiring reasons and I am sure they have been given with complete honesty. But here is my question to all of the entrepreneurs - Are you an entrepreneur because you are an escapist? Before I explain what I mean, let me explain what I do not mean. Those who came to do a startup because they wanted to break out of the system or didn't fit in are not escapist by my definition. Neither are those who wanted to "escape" the corporate ...

For the first time I was on the other side of the table in a book festival and it turned out to be a lot of fun. The feeling when somebody finally, after a lot of deliberation picks up a book and says that he wants to buy it, the whole money exchange ritual which happens after that, seeing people find something to smile about or laugh at in one of the books - all of them make it worth while to sit jobless behind the counter for hours. So while as an exhibitor I quite enjoyed it, I don't think it was particularly great for a real book lover. There was nothing that you could not find in the few book shops around Church Street, it was choke full of religious stalls and despite the tall claims, almost all major Indian publishers were absent - Rupa, Harper Collins, Random Hous e, Hachette India, Westland, Rajpal being the once who come to mind. I remember seeing Katha stall also but even they were missing this time. So at the end of it all, you end up in the same old stalls - Blossoms, ...

This article about Room To Read in Business Week caught my attention, (through a Google Alert set up on Self Publishing). Specifically the last paragraph which I reproduce here: While Room to Read's accomplishments so far are quite impressive, John isn't satisfied. Children aren't using the libraries enough. Of the 5.6 million books in the libraries, only 1.3 million have been checked out so far. So Wood's local teams are working with schools to make the library experience more compelling to children. Self-publishing content is another piece of the strategy. The more books the organization can publish in local languages that are sculpted for young readers in those places, the more likely they'll want to read them. Unfortunately, it costs about $12,000 per book for writing, editing, and printing expenses. While generating more engaging content, content tailored to local culture, environment and in local languages is very important, I think there is one more importa...

Slumdog star Rubina to pen biography! While I am all for people trying to make use of the popularity of these kids for good cause (the proceeds from the book will go to some charity in.. France!), this is stretching it too much. She is all of 9 years old. Somebody applied to our company with this cover letter: I am writing to apply for any job opening is there in your company. ... I believe my education, skills and experiences fit your requirements... Again, don't get me wrong. I know searching for a job can be quite tough but then you have to keep your game up in the tough times and not write such sloppy letters. If you are applying to "any" job, how does your "education, skills and experiences fit our requirement"? Regular programming will resume in a while!

I went to the BlogCamp Bangalore few days back and listened to some of the talks. A nice talk by Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures was the highlight of the day for me. Another interesting thing was a contest being run by Seagate who were the main sponsors of the event. They have launched FreeAgent External Hard Drives in the capacities of 500GB and 1TB. Now that is a lot of space! Challenge is to come up with a creative use for all this space. What immediately come to my mind is a book mobile. A book mobile is a van that is Internet enabled and has print-on-demand equipment on board (a b/w printer, a color printer, a binder and a trimmer). The van goes around and prints books for people who want them. The biggest problem for deploying this van into more rural areas in the availability of Internet. But with the huge space available with Seagate FreeAgent drives, we can put all the available books - from Internet Archive, from Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, from Digital Library of India - o...

As we are moving to use more and more "AJAX" on pothi.com, I keep learning new things everyday some of which really entertain me :-). So let me put them down here. How to make sure that an image refreshes from server and not from cache? Suppose you have an img tag and the file in its src attribute is being updated on the server through a ajax call. Now we have to make sure that when the src file changes, the image on the page is also refreshed. On its own, the browser will simply use the version of the file in the cache. To avoid that, you can simply attach a GET query to the end of the image url. So src="test.png" becomes something like - src="test.png?random=<any randomly generated string>". For the random string you can use the surrent time stamp. Short and sweet :-) How to show a download dialogue for files that browser usually opens without asking? Browsers usually have a mapping of MIME types and applications. If they get data of a particular m...

"तुम भी प्रियतम?" "अब छोड तुम्हे मुझको आगे जाना होगा, अब नयी मंजिलें रह रह पास बुलाती हैं। अब तुमसे जोडा नाता बंधन सा लगता, अब नयी सुबह कुछ नये क्षितिज दिखलाती है।" "अलविदा प्रिये!" ------------------------------------------------- "तज कर अतीत को और भविष्य पर दर्ष्टि जमा,  जीवन पथ पर आगे को मैं बढ आया हूं। हाथों के बंधन पैरों के कांटों बदले, टूटे वादों की किर्चें संग ले आया हूं। अब नये स्वप्न मानो आंखों मे चुभते हैं, अब नयी दिशा, अंजान डगर सहमाती हैं। अब द्रढ निश्चय से मेरा कोई साथ नही, ना नयी चुनौती अब उत्साह जगाती है। किस तरह से अब कोई नया नाता जोडूं? नाता फ़िर से एक दिन बंधन बन जायेगा। और तोड के बंधन फ़िर आगे जाना होगा, क्या यूंही अभागा ये जीवन कट जायेगा?"

It has been long since e-commerce made its debut in India but it is still to catch on in a major way. The absence of Amazon from Indian market is a major indication that it is not yet considered a lucrative enough market by big players. A lot has been said about it, tons of research papers written, lots of  workshops/panels have probably discussed it to death. I have not read any of them and so pardon me if what I am going to say sounds very amateurish. As somebody who is betting on a business model that has Internet distribution at its core, it is very important for me to understand why e-commerce has not caught on in India and what would it take? There is a first obvious bunch of reasons that comes to mind - lack of broadband penetration, lack of good online payment mechanisms ( which includes lack of widespread credit card use and absolutely pathetic state of Indian payment gateways), lack of good logistic providers ( some are way too costly while others are simply not ...

10:30 AM on Sunday mornings. That is the time when Open Coffee Club Bangalore meets at some pre-selected venue - usually a nice and cozy coffee shop or a newly-opened-looking-for-some-exposure restaurant. It is a great way of finding out good places to have coffee and off beat food. For example, I discovered Tam's in Koramangala through one of the meets. While for me this is a good enough reason to get up every alternate Sunday mornings and head to OCC meet, you might find the entrepreneurship aspect of OCC more alluring. Essentially OCC comprises of folks who are somehow related to entrepreneurship, startups, ecosystem - those sort of things and cannot afford to drink on Sunday mornings. So they (me included) end up getting together and talk about issues that affect us, opportunities that we can use and generally get to know each other. The diversity of the group is amazing. A sample of people from the most recent meet in ZOE, Indiranagar - A chartered Accountant, A fashion and im...

I went to see the demo pits of Headstart 2009 at the NIMHANS convention center in Bangalore today. It was nice of the organizers to make these free thus providing good opportunities of interaction to the participating companies and also showing poor entrepreneurs like me that they care ;). Over to the companies, there were some really nice ones. I found the demo from Artin Dynamic most cute (I know that is probably not a compliment a startup expects but can't help it). Basically how about having a power supply with a USB interface to the CPU. Now when the CPU is off, it basically cuts off the power supply thus eliminating the zombie usage completely. The product is called SPARA. Nice! Then there were two companies that seem to be doing NLP analysis of the data in order to get structure out of them. One of them was alertpedia which monitors some selected websites in order to match the new additions against structured queries specified by the users. Whenever a match occurs, the use...

Found this on a forum. In the time of recession the first casualties are the small guys. Although the common sense says that the first casualties should be the big guys - small guys don't have investors on their backs pushing for growth at all costs, they are more flexible and adaptable to situations and so on. But the fact remains that all the systems are build for the advantage of big guns and it is with great difficulty that individuals or small publishers make their way in. So when the crunch time comes, they are the first ones to be thrown off the boat. So the question arises - how do we build a recession proof distribution channel for the individual authors? Of course Amazon is already one option but how can we go beyond Amazon? And what about a country like India where digital divide is so huge - how can we use all the technology at our disposal and make publishing/books available to those who don't have access to it and miss it the most? We've seen something devasta...

Recently India's first air conditioned bus stand opened up in Bangalore. In a state that is reeling under severe power shortage - street lights are off on many roads in Bangalore, farmers in the state are getting electricity in the night, hence watering the fields in night and getting bitten by snakes in turn - 2 deaths and 6 more cases in past month or so. And in a city with a lovely weather, which is said to have natural air conditioning in place. Sure it has deteriorated in years but still pretty powerful if you ask my running nose and coughing throat. And in such a city and such a state, we proudly build a air conditioned bus stand. It is wrong on so many counts that it makes me desperate.

Five of our books are being launched today in Bangalore Book Festival. I am very excited and a little nervous too :-). Please come to the launch and show your support. We promise it will be interesting. Here is a Press Release with some more information - Print-on-Demand titles come to Bangalore Book Festival . You can see the titles being launched on Pothi.com . Time: 4:30pm Venue: Gayatri Vihar, Palace Grounds,  Near Mekhri Circle, Bangalore upcoming page

The Bangalore Book Festival is back. It is happening at Palace Gorunds from 14th - 23rd November. There are going to be over 275 stalls by various publishers and booksellers. I am excited about it both as a book lover and also as somebody who now has business interest in publishing and printing . Check out the details about the festival here : Bangalore Book Festical 2008 I visited the 2004 festival and was mightly pleased with the tons and tons of books all around. That was also the start of my professional life and for the first time I had lots of disposable money on my hands. As a result, I returned back home with around 15 books in my hands, some of them still unread 4 years later :-). But the excitment of buying books is always worth it. Do leave a comment if you plan to go to the festival. What are your expectations? Looking for some rare books? Hoping to discover some new and exciting publishers?

The foreword to Guy Kawasaki's new book by the Fake Steve Jobs. Funny ! I don't know if it will make me jump out of the window and head to a book store to buy the book but will sure make me pick it up and turn few pages whenever I see it next. This may have something to do with me being a poor cash-strapped entrepreneur who loves books. But it sure proves the worth of a suitable foreword in marketing a book. Enjoy ! You know what I think about whenever I hear the name Guy Kawasaki? Motorcycles. It's true. It's the first thing I think about when I hear his name, even though I???ve been told again and again that Guy actually has nothing to do with motorcycles. So then I try not to think about motorcycles, but come on, the dude's name is Kawasaki. What else are you going to think about? And don't say Vietnam because that is not cool, people. Not cool at all. Guy was just a friggin kid when all that shit was going down. Anyway, since Guy is not a motorcycle designer...