Basket Case

छोड़ कर शाख क्यों सड़कों पे चले आते हैं, फूल मासूम हैं, नाहक ही सज़ा पाते हैं। स्याह पड़ती हुई इस शहर की बेनूर शकल, रंग दो पल को झलकते हैं, गुज़र जाते हैं। भागते दौड़ते इस शहर के कुछ वाशिंदे, साल भर फरवरी की याद में बिताते हैं। फूल इंसान की उम्मीद के सितारे हैं, आँख उठती है दुआ में, तो नज़र आते हैं। शहर के फूल अभागा बड़ी किस्मत वाले, ठोकरों से नहीं, कारों से कुचले जाते हैं।

One of the mantras of entrepreneurship is to build something that people want. The road to success is lined with geeks who dreamt of beautiful solutions existing in perfect worlds for problems that no one seemed to have. Lean startup formalizes this in terms of customer development. The aim is to identify a customer who is willing to pay you money today for what you can deliver tomorrow. Recently there was an article in NYT about how the American fast food industry  has filled people's plates with more salt, sugar and fats in an effort to sell more junk food. Many of the executives, when confronted with questions about these practices, defended themselves on the pretext that they were only giving people what they wanted. If they do not give it to them, someone else will. Why is it that these executives seem to be doing something wrong (or bad if wrong sounds too strong)? They were merely following the oft repeated advice for building a successful business. In fact, making food...

जब इस बार मिलें हम तुम, कुछ अलग सा मुझको पाओ तो, हाथ पकड़ लूं मैं बढ कर, तुम मुझसे शर्मा जाओ तो? नींद नही आये पर सपनो से बोझिल होकर पलकें, मुंद जाएँ और तुम काँधे पर सर रख कर सो जाओ तो? गर साथ हो बस दो पल का और फिर जीवन भर का इंतज़ार, दो पल न बीतें कभी, समय बस वहीं कहीं रुक जाए तो? जो कहना चाहें दोनो कुछ पर बात जुबां पर ना आये, और देख हमारी दुविधा चन्दा बादल में छुप जाए तो? कभी आँख तेरी गर भर आये और मेघदूत बन कर बादल, तेरी आँखों के मोती मेरे आँगन बिखरा जाए तो?

Over at HSI , Vijay Anand of Startup Centre and Proto.in fame, posted some excellent thoughts about the wannabe entrepreneurs who are looking for technical co-founders: A Trademark Skillset (and I am reiterating) is that one thing you are absolutely known for - it might be people skills; to be able to bring people together around a problem, form a solution and build an enterprise around it, it might be more specific around technology, or design, or fundraising (sic), or sales / business development - but it has to be one quality that you have, that the entire organization (sic) can bet on.  You should read the full post on HSI .

There has been a lot of talk in the Indian media recently about the lack of profitability of major Indian e-commerce players. Many of them are also trying out different strategies to manage finances while maintaining growth. While Flipkart has been tweaking discounts and raising limits for free shipping (a move that was quickly followed by almost everyone), IndiaPlaza has excused itself out of the discount race by saying that they want to be the " only money making e-commerce company " out of the top 3-4 players and not the biggest. However HomeShop18 seems have sensed an opportunity here and has put almost the entire books category on unprecedented discounts! I was hard pressed to find any title that has less then 29-30% discount. Most of the titles are as highly discounted as 35-40%. This includes even the titles which they might be importing from outside. In all my searching, I came across one title which was at 10%. This is insane! And if this was not enough, they have...

Couple of years ago at Pothi.com, we were working on a Hindi poetry book. It was a collection of poetry of the father that the son was publishing.  It was a very big deal for the son. He had organized a family gathering and book launch in his home town. We were working on a tight schedule but the books were shipped with time remaining on the clock. The book launch was on Tuesday and the consignment reached the client on Saturday afternoon. Shortly afterwards, I received a call from them. Getting a call or an email from the clients after they have received the books is not uncommon. There is something about holding your own printed book in your hands that moves people. It is usually a time to celebrate after the long time spent working on the book. However sometimes, things go wrong. When our clients opened the consignment, shiny new books came out. However on leafing through the pages, they realized that while the cover was of their book, the interior was something entirely di...

Some people seem to misunderstand the "high risk, high gain" maxim. They argue that if I am taking some risk, I should get the reward. I recently heard a candidate expecting 100% raise when considering an opening at a startup. When you hear "high risk, high gain", pay attention to the order. Risk comes before gain. Often much before. And the fact that the (monetary) gain is not guaranteed is part of the risk (in the startup environment). While you are at it, find out about the concept of expected value. Your aim should be to maximize the expected value of your reward over next N years of your career. Now depending on your definition of reward, that might mean that you are better off in a job with a bigger company which is perfectly rad. But at least, you won't have ridiculous expectations! PS: Just as I was posting the article, the right idiom occurred to me: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. So there.

Although we are already 2 months past the middle of the year, I decided to do a "mid year" review of my technical goals for this year to see how am I doing. Here we go: HAML, SAAS & Coffeescript : No progress :( SproutCore & BackBone.js : After a cursory look, I decided to explore Backbone.js for our upcoming project at Pothi.com. Still getting a feel of it. Learn Haskell : Deferred Git : Since Drupal moved to Git, it is hard to ignore it and I am beginning to get familiar with it. But given that we use trac, I don't think we will be leaving SVN anytime soon. Android : No progress SQL : Finally starting to dig into this. Not a very planned effort but in 6 months managed to understand few more nut and bolts of Mysql. Ran a few Explains finally :). Learnt to generate slow queries log and also managed to fix some obnoxious queries sitting in Ubercart. Beautiful Code : I realized that "finishing" beautiful code is not the right way to appr...

Recently, one of the major Indian payment gateways, CCAvenue was reported to have been hacked. Medianama has good coverage of it including an interview with the very bureaucratic sounding CEO of the company . While a payment gateway getting hacked is a big news, the bigger revelation were the clear text passwords that came out of the compromised database. There have been a lot of comments and discussions about this all over the startup blogs. Reading through those comments it appeared to me that there is a lot of confusion regarding passwords and how to securely store and transmit them. Saurabh Nanda has a good little primer about things to read. This is my attempt to clarify some of the things involved. First a few basics. Any situation that involves passwords has 2 parties. The aim is to establish identity between parties. For simplicity, we will assume that it is the user that wants to establish his identity with the service. Login/Password system works on the basis of ...

हार कर उठने की क्षमता अब नहीं मुझ में रही, वो ह्रदय की मधुर ममता अब नहीं मुझमे रही. अब तो मैं संसार के वारों से होकर छिन्न-भिन्न, बन गया हूँ रूद्र हिंसक आर्तनादी नरपशु. अब मेरी सब इन्द्रियां रक्षा में मेरी व्यस्त हैं. मधुर गुंजन मधुप का गांडीव की टंकार है दामिनी का दमकना अब युद्ध की ललकार है, दीख पड़ते हैं मुझे चहुँ ओर अपने शत्रु दल, सांस की आवाज़ मानो शून्य में चित्कार है. मान था अभिमन्यु सा, अब द्रोण सुत सी वेदना!

Recently we decided to get a static IP for our office broadband connection. We are a long time Airtel customer and usually not very annoyed with their service. They are quick to respond to complaints and things mostly work as they should. We placed a request for a static IP and were told that it would require a 1 hour downtime to set up. 1 hour is no big deal and so we asked them to go ahead. Our connection went out at around 5pm on Thursday evening. Someone was coming to set up the router for static IP. The person arrived at 9pm and started configuring the router confidently. We were hoping it to be a fairly quick and smooth process but suddenly the disaster struck! The 4-5 steps which he had been taught didn't get the link up. After that it was one hour of him calling various people, trying out some really weird configurations and generally hitting refresh. After struggling with it for 1 hour, he told us that our router did not "support" the static IP. He promised t...

A major group of Indian publishers is up in arms against a proposed amendment to the copyright act of India. Put simply, the said amendment allows for the export of any edition of a title into India even if specific Indian editions are already available.  There are some genuine points both for and against the issue. However the debate has long since devolved into fear mongering and finger pointing. One of the interesting claim of the publishers is that the said amendment will also legalize the export of Low Prized Editions of text books and technical books back to USA and UK. As a result, publishers in those market are likely to stop giving licenses for LPEs. I personally think that it is very far fetched. There is enough protection against such imports in USA/UK markets. Some short sighted foreign publishers might pull out but then that should not be the guiding factor of our policies anyway. However the reaction from publishers set me thinking in another direction. Given its s...

That the education system in India is screwed up is no secret. When companies like Infosys, TCS and Wipro say that a large number of engineers graduating every year are unemployable, it sets a pretty low bar on the quality of technical education. The low standards of technical education are felt most acutely by the entrepreneurs trying to build technology companies in India. On one hand, very few good engineers survive the education system. On the other, the few who survive are claimed by the companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and other well established firms. Now it would be excellent to tackle this problem head on and fix the education system in a fundamental way. However I have been thinking about a much smaller problem recently. As a matter of immediate relief to the high technology startups, is it possible to help more geeks/hackers to survive the current system? What is the most effective way of doing that? Out of that huge swamp of mediocrity, how can we give a he...

When running you own company, every year is full of new challenges and learnings. And so was the 2010. However looking back, I am feeling that I didn't gain so much on the technical side. Recap The two major things that happened on Pothi.com this year were e-books and the launch of online distribution. Our e-book platform is in the first iteration and still very primitive. We have identified many issues by now which will get fixed in the installment. Online Distribution required a lot of overhaul to the basic pricing mechanism which meant bunch of new Drupal modules. And as the year ends, I am just about wrapping up the new sales dashboard which was long overdue! We also worked on couple of interesting projects over the summers with 2 interns both of which were in Python/Django. One of them made further improvements to blog2book platform. It is a shame that it has not been pushed to production yet. Primarily due to the memory troubles we are having on VPS and which I have been ...

I have mixed feelings for the Facebook "Like" button. In the Facebook universe, "like" is the uniform mechanism for interacting with various pieces of content flowing around. You can Like status updates, photos, comments on updates and photos, Pages and even ads! One interaction to rule them all. The reasoning behind it is that it reduces friction and leads to more people clicking on the like button. This is what Facebook would want the users to do. But what does it mean for us? How do you feel about coloring the whole world in the 2 colors of "like" and .. well, "no comments"? From the perspective of somebody who likes the human languages a lot, it is distressing. One feature of human languages is that they are wonderfully precise. The variety of expressions and words available to describe very similar but distinct actions, feelings, things is not only useful but also charming. And this precision is very selective. Different cultures develop...

In another 10 days, 2010 will be past. A past, we can never visit again. But we are humans, a inherently optimistic lot. We don't worry about past, we look forward to future. Well atleast sometimes :) One of the most popular and perhaps the most way of looking forward to coming year is to take resolutions. While they hardly last for more than few weeks in most cases, everyone keeps taking them every year. Which is fine - they make you exercise for at least for those few weeks. Anything is better than nothing! Now one way to make your resolutions last longer would be give them some momentum before hand. Why not start working on that reading list right away? Or start getting up a little early everyday starting today. By the time new year rolls in, you would already have started the journey, perhaps even stopped and started again. That should prove to be more effective then suddenly getting up on 1st of January and telling yourself that you are a changed person now. Try it. I am t...

If you ever find yourself saying, "If you don't believe me, you can ask <insert a trusted party>", stop. It is already too late. You cannot make up for the lack of trust by borrowing it from someone. On the other hand, you can borrow money in a time of crunch. So when faced with a choice between keeping somebody's trust or saving some money, choice should be obvious.

If you are a hacker and a student in India and you are interested in doing a startup, you have a golden opportunity in your hands. The Google Summer of Code (GSoC)  program offers $5000 for a 4 month project you do for one of the participating open source projects. You get a mentor, hands on experience of implementing something which will potentially be used by real users and also get to be a part of an ever growing community of hackers in India. Now let us say, you were able to get into the program. So you have access to: Money At today's conversion rate, $5000 translates to Rs.2,22,000/- approximately. After paying taxes (which comes at max to about Rs.6500/- assuming male and no other income), you are left with 2,15,000 in your hands. For a college student, 4 months expenses can be as low as Rs.10,000 when living on campus. But let us keep it at Rs.25,000/- assuming you really decided to live it up. Still there are ~Rs.1,90,000 in your account. Excellent Pool of Co-founders...

First a little experiment. The other day, I needed to count words in a string. One straightforward method for this is to break the string into tokens and count them: def count_words_split(sen): return len(sen.split()) This is nice since split automatically takes care of multiple consecutive spaces if present. However in my case all the words were guaranteed to be separated by 1 space only. So following should get the job done with a little less work: def count_words_count(sen): return sen.count(' ') + 1 This is essentially a single pass over the string with no need to create an intermediate list of strings and so should run faster. Surprisingly, on Python 2.5, the first method is twice as fast as the second one. I have no idea why. However sanity is restored on Python 2.6 and the second version is not only faster but also gets better with increasing size of input. This got me thinking about a good introductory programming language. I learned programming with C and ...

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 ...