May 2005 Archives

I had an extremely frustrating day yesterday. Literally the whole day was spent in doing something as trivial as installing PHP5 on our server machine. I use XAMPP on my Windows laptop for LAMP development and switching to PHP5 on it was a breeze. So I wasn't anticipating any problems on Linux as well. Boy, was I wrong! It turned out that PHP5 doesn't bundle with MySQL client libraries anymore. So MySQL support needs to be explicitly compiled in. Fine, lets compile PHP5. Of course that didn't help. Now Apache started crashing. And Pear DB.php package started crashing silently. Turns out Apache must be compiled with prefork MPM (whatever that means). Apache was pre-installed on my server as part of setup. I could only guess that it was compiled with wrong options. So then I ended up downloading the source code for Apache and compiling it with the right options. Did I tell you I had to clean install Fedora also on my server before I could install apache? After a full day or compiling and messing things up, my machine was practically unusable.

Sigh!!! Yesterday's experience made me wonder why is that there is no MSI style setup system for Linux. Even open source technologies like Apache and PHP install very smoothly on Windows. Of course, Windows has its own issues with dll-hell and apps breaking other apps (a lot of this will be fixed with .NET 2.0 and Longhorn). Being a closed system also helps I guess.

On the other hand, RPMs and DEB packages in Linux come closest to MSIs in Windows. My recent experiences have made me wary of using RPMs. I need more control on the compile options. Linux also suffers from the fact that there are numerous distros. Supporting each distro with a single setup program is virtually impossible. Even supporting two differet versions of Windows becomes a nightmare for Microsoft. Then, licensing issues crop up. For example, PHP5 doesn't ship with MySQL client libs because of some change in licensing policy. So if you want MySQL support, compiling from source seems to be the only option.

In my humble (and probably naieve) opinion, single click installs are a key to getting wider adoption of Linux. Even as a developer, I find having to compile source code unpleasant. For a home or office user, that is unthinkable. The Visual Studio setup wizard makes it extremely simple to create an elegant looking setup for your application. We need something like that for Linux. If compatibility with all the different distros is an issue, then maybe some sort of consensus and standardization is required. From the point of view of an ISV who developes software for Linux, providing support can become a nightmare if all the hundered different distros need to be supported.

I guess that is enough ranting for the day. I strongly believe in being technology agnostic. I develop on both Windows and Linux platforms. So even though I might be coming across as a Linux basher, I am just a frustrated software guy letting off some steam :)

A TV channel (the channel name is 'CNBC Awaaz' I guess - maybe a new channel) is reporting that ICICI bank abducted the son of a customer who was unable to pay off his credit card bill. This man owed the bank around Rs 4800 (roughly $100) and his son was freed only after he paid off the bill.

I am not sure of the authenticity of this report - maybe the channel is reporting only one side of the story. But I have heard of force being used by banks to recover debt. Some banks are believed to hire goons who work as debt recovery agents. But an actual abduction is really taking things to an extreme.

To a large extent, the banks have only themselves to blame. Most banks are very eager to lend out money. Usually a salary slip suffices. Compound that with the fact that in India we still don't have the concept of credit history. So there is no fool proof way to determine the loan worthiness of an individual.

Of late, I had been a little lax in paying off my bills. I am going to take this news item as a wake up call :)

My colleague Nazim can't contain his excitement about rich internet applications. I routinely show cool AJAX apps like Google Maps and Laszlo while interviewing prospective candidates. It is interesting to see how different people react. If it doesn't excite a candidate (hard to believe, but many just don't think this is cool stuff), then he or she is probably not a good fit for the kind of work we are doing. Many get excited but also get scared that this stuff is beyond their capabilities. I have heard some say this is something they "can't do". Then there are a few, who get a gleam in their eyes. You can sense the excitement in their voice. You can see that in an instant their horizons have expanded - they are already thinking where they can use this new technology. That is the kind of people I want to work with!

And hey Nazim, you will be dirtying your hands with AJAX and Laszlo very soon!

[via Slashdot] Blogebrity has come up with a list people of who it thinks are the celebs of the blogosphere. I have often times heard the term "blah blah is an A-list blogger" but never really knew what the criteria is to be considered A-list. Well I still don't know the criteria but now at least I know who these people are :) Interstingly, I personally know at least one person from each of the three lists - JD Lasica, Marc Canter and Rajesh Jain. As far as I can make out, Rajesh is the only Indian blogger on the list - or at least the only Indian blogger who resides in India.

Way back in school and college days, I used to be a morning person. My school bus came at 6 AM and classes in college used to start at 8. So sleeping late was never an option for me. I always preferred studying early mornings rather than late nights. All that changed when I went to Microsoft. Flexible hours meant it was perfectly OK to walk into work at 11. That, coupled with the fact that I lived just 5 mins away from work got me into the habit of waking up really late. Now I am trying to become a morning person again. But old habits die hard! I can barely open my eyes at 6 in the morning, no matter how early I go to bed. I have been trying it for a week now and hopefully it will come naturally to me soon.

Being a morning person makes a lot of sense. In a city like Delhi, early mornings are the only time when the weather is somewhat bearable. So thats the best time to take a walk, go jogging or play tennis. I can also beat the rush hour and save another 40 minutes otherwise spent in a traffic jam. And on reaching office early, I get almost 2 hours of quiet time to catch up on email, read and write blogs, and in general plan my day.

Of late I have had the good fortune to meet a lot of very successful people. My observation is that they are all early morning people. So that is another motivation to set the alarm clock for an hour earlier :)

[Via Marc] Google has come up with its personalized homepage ala My Yahoo or MSN. As Marc points out, its beginning of the next generation of portal wars. One thing I really liked about the Google portal is the ability to customize layout using drag-n-drop.

If you think about any of the "my *" services from Yahoo, MSN or Google, they are in the end content aggregators. How many sources of content a particular service can support might become a differentiating factor. Of course in an ideal world with open standards, it would become a non-issue. Another thing of interest is who will take the lead in allowing people to not just aggregate, but create content as well?

On one end we have blogger (which is really google), typepad, Ourmedia etc which allow you to publish content. On the other extreme are all these portal services which allow aggregation. When (and where) shall the two meet?

I have yet to see a nastier email bug than this. My gmail address is gauravbhatnagar at gmail dot com. But every now and then, emails sent to gaurav.bhatnagar (note the dot between first and last name) also come to me! It has happened at least 4 times before. And I know other people who have observed the same thing. What is really amazing is that the first time I noticed this bug was over 6 months ago. I can't remember for sure now,but I think I had even reported it (back in the days when gmail had a "report bug" link). I wonder if my emails are also sometimes routed to gaurav.bhatnagar. Will somebody at Google please take note? This can't be that hard to fix!

Watching TV right now...balsts in 2 cinema halls in Delhi. Seems politically motivated since both the theatres were playing the movie "Jo Bole So Nihal". This sucks. :(

Three of my close friends and cousins are studying to become doctors. I had heard that getting a medicine degree is hard, but had no idea how hard it is until I saw it from close quarters. Firstly, it takes forever to become a doctor. In India, the basic medical degree MBBS requires a minimum of 4.5 years of course work. This is followed by 1 year of rigorous internship. I am told that MBBS alone isn't worth much today so during internship, one must prepare hard for the entrace exam for admission for getting a post graduate degree. Get a PG degree takes another 3 years. It is these PG students who actually keep the hospitals running. An average shift is 40 hours long - yes 40 hours! No break for shower or shave. So thats 8.5 years of non stop struggle. In certain fields of medicine, getting a super specialization degree is considered almost mandatory. So that is another couple of years gone.

My friend who is in second year of PG often has to sit in for night shifts at the university hospital. His usual patients in that shift are drunkard picked up by the police during the night. That can't be fun.

Medicine is one profession which requires dedication beyond imagination. To knowingly take on a life long struggle of such magnitude, that too to serve others, requires immense courage (or perhaps innocence of youth...). Hats off to all the doctors out there!

After more than 3 months since we started, we finally have a website! Please check out http://www.tekritisoftware.com It took us several iterations to come up with this website. The theme of the website is "leading by energy" which is also our byline. So we have used lots of orange to represent energy and light. The logo is a blazing sun with the company name in the middle. We got a great testimonial from Marc for the website. Thanks Marc!

Please help spread the word! A trackback or mention on your blog will be really really appreciated! Comments and feedback are most welcome!

Ourmedia crossed a big milestone today - there are now over 5000 videos, audios, texts and images uploaded to the Archive through Ourmedia. That is a big number, considering the fact that the site has been in alpha release for just about 6 weeks. Congratulations to Marc, JD, and the entire dev and moderator teams!

Interestingly, more than half of the uploads on Ourmedia have been videos. So there are over 2500 home videos, mashups, indie movies, music videos out there for your viewing pleasure. Have you been to Ourmedia lately?

Anil Dash has some intersting advice on how to price one's goods and services:

"I think I came up with my best suggestion today, and it involves only two simple steps:
1. Slap the client in face.
2. Tell the client your hourly rate.
If the person looked more shocked, horrified, offended, hurt, saddened, or wounded by the slap in the face, then you are still pricing yourself too low."

I have been trying to write a spec for our new product idea since last 3 days. I am afraid I have gotten some sort of a writer's block and I am unable to put my ideas in words. This is especially frustrating because I am truly passionate about what we are trying to build and I have thought about it and planned for it for almost 2 years. So it is not like I am trying to cook up a story here. Heck, I should have been able to write this spec in my sleep.

Since office hours are spent in keeping our clients happy, every night I sit down and spend some time on this spec. Unfortunately I have very little to show for all the time I have spent on it. But now our bright young IIT interns are starting from Monday. And I must have something ready for them by then. So back to the drawing board....

Ajaxian.com has a good round up of the recently concluded AJAX summit. I believe it was first of its kind and its a clear sign of things to come. I am always intrigued at how fast buzzwords become popular over the internet, and particulary over the blogosphere. The technology that enables AJAX has been around for years. But only now it is getting so much attention. I believe Google has had a big role in this. They have really pushed the envelope with their rich web applications and managed to do what was previously thought impossible.

Around December last year, Ashish and myself created our own first AJAX application. It was a blog indexing search engine (which we affectionately called Bloogle) with a Google Suggest
type interface. It was done over a period of 5-7 days solely to impress a prospective client. I have reasons to believe that our client was impressed :)

Since then, I have come across Laszlo and I feel it has the potential to become the preferred platform for developing Rich Internet Applications. Laszlo was created from the ground up for developing RIAs while AJAX is an innovative use of an existing technology (XMLHttp and Javascript). Microsoft's next gen windows client platform called Avalon also aims to enable rich internet as well as desktop applications. Interestingly Avalon uses a similar XML markup based approach for creating the user interface as Laszlo. It will be interesting to see if Laszlo community (Laszlo is open source) will try to create any migration tools to enable seamless transition to Avalon from Laszlo, once Longhorn is released.

MiniMSFT is a blog run by an anonymous Microsoft employee who believes that Microsoft needs to shed some fat (read - incompetent people) to get competitive again. I used to occasionally read this blog while I was at Microsoft and ran into it again today. It makes for interesting reading though one must keep in mind that it is obviously a blog with an agenda. Reading the comments on that blog, one might feel that Microsofties are one discontended lot. But I think that is not really true. Employee turnover is really low at Microsoft and in my three years there, I was the only person in my group who left on his own will. In fact, one of my concerns at Microsoft was that it had become such a comfort zone for me. Work was great, benefits were awesome, I lived just across the road from the campus and in general life was good. While that is nothing to complain about, I realized that within a few more years of the same life, I would never be able to get out of my comfort zone. Hence, I made the move. And lets just say, I have put myself in quite an uncomfortable zone right now :)

I have over 2200 comments on my blog now of which, my guess is that 1800 are spam. I am recieving almost 200 comments everyday now. There is a serious threat that spam will just kill my blog. Unfortunately my MT blog is hosted on a Windows server and MT-Blacklist doesn't work on Windows yet.

But dealing with comment spam in number 1 on my list of TODOs for this blog. If that means, digging into MT code and hacking something up, so be it. I am really tired of this now.

I got an email today which simply said:

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!

There is something extremely wierd about this email. I googled it and found dozens of instances of people getting the exact same email from the exact same person. Look at how many people have blogged about it. Now add me to the list. Preliminary investigation suggests that this is Hare Krishna followers trying to spread the word of happiness.

Typically you reject such emails as spam and never think about it again. But for whatever reason, this email seems to intrigue everybody who gets it. Wierd.

I will shout out Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga! I could sure use some happiness right now :)

I learnt my first lessons in human resource management this week. With Manish also on board, we got an oppurtunity to devote some time on setting up some processes and company policies. Now everybody needs to fill a timesheet every Friday. A formal hierarchy (flat though it is) has been introduced and 1-1s have been scheduled between managers and their reports. A rigorous performance evaluation system has also been put in place. Much of the credit for this goes to Manish who is using his rich Infosys experience to the max.

The general notion is that employees hate rules and processes. Especially engineers. So we started out with an approach of having minimalistic rules and regulations. I think that was a mistake. Not because there was any indiscipline or slacking off happening in absence of these rules. But to a great extent, processes and rules give the company its identity. Company policies are the seeds that will slowly germinate into our company's "culture". I feel introducing all these processes was a great morale booster. Suddenly, from being a bunch of engineers sitting in a room writing code, we are now all part of a company. All of us have stretch goals to meet and everybody is getting evaluated constantly. Contrary to what you (or at least I) would have expected, everybody has been visibly upbeat this week. It has been a big lesson for me. Very rarely do you encounter something that seems to go against logic, and yet works like magic.

Good job Manish!

On other fronts - we now have company email, domain name, health insurance, weekly tech talks lined up. Yes folks, we are a real company now! :)

Our company finally has a name - Tekriti Software. I have to admit that this name was given a rather luke warm welcome by our employees. But I really like this name - Tekriti = Technology + Kriti (invention in Hindi). So the name represents what we stand for - inventing innovating solutions using technology.

We will very soon have a website as well at http://www.tekritisoftware.com

I was driving back from office last night (yes, I work on many Sundays. No, I dont have a life) , when a truck stopped ahead of me on a red light. Trucks in India always have something witty or creative hand painted on the read bumper - "buri nazar waale, tera mu kaala", or "chunnu de munnu de papa di gaddi" or "13 mera 7" etc (sorry folks, I have no idea how to translate that to English :))

Now the truck in front of me didn't have anything like that painted on its rear bumper. Instead, it had on it, in big bold letters, an advertisement for a .NET and J2EE training center.

You know there is an IT boom in India when you see .NET and J2EE advertisements on the back of trucks. :)

I have become quite a whiner of late. I am afraid it shows on my blog. However, I feel most of my whining is justified. Now take the case of my msn email account. As a Microsoft employee, I had signed up for some promotional offer which gave me 2 GB of space for my msn email account. That was great, and my joy was unbounded. So I was going about happily filling up that 2 gig when last week, out of nowhere, my account limit was reduced to a measly 2 MB. 2MB! From 2GB to 2 MB in a day! Worse, since I had a healthy 73MB of emails in my inbox, my account was disabled and email started bouncing. I panicked, and basically got arm twisted into paying $20 to Microsoft for getting my 2 GB back. I wanted to know why I wasn't given the usual 250MB of space that everybody else gets for free. And why wasn't I informed that they were going to shrink my mailbox? So I sent email to MSN support but never heard back from them.

Surely that's worth whining about, huh?