July 2005 Archives

After a bloody clash between workers of a Honda factory and the police, the Leftist parties called for a Gurgaon 'bandh' yesterday. 'Bandh' in Hindi means 'close down' and a call for 'bandh' is a call for shutting down business for that day. While we did not close down office, it reminded me of the turbulent 90s.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s where bandhs, strikes and agitations were part and parcel of daily life. The Congress party had dominated the elections since independence and India was ruled by three generations of the Gandhis (Nehru, Indira and Rajiv). In late 80s, the Janta Dal and BJP rose in popularity. Reasons ranging from caste politics, religious fervor and callous attitude of the incumbent government saw the Congress lose in the 1989 elections. That marked the beginning of turmoil and political unrest in India. One of the first steps which the leftist Janta Dal took was to enforce seat reservation in educational insitutions and government jobs for the lower and backward castes (I am assuming the reader knows something about India's 'caste system'). Reservation in educational instituions was met by very violent protests by the students from upper castes. At that time 'bandhs' were a daily affair. Police clashed with students every day and many self immolated them as a mark of protest. I was in grade 6 at that time and our school was shut down for almost two months. There were days when our school bus was stopped mid way by protesters and we were sent back to home. The consequence of this unrest was that India saw three different prime ministers in a span of 2 years.

When Narsimha Rao became the prime minister in 1991, India was financially bankrupt to the point that we had to pawn Gold to avoid defaulting on our debts. International pressure at this time forced India to open its economy to the world. Dr. Manmohan Singh, our current Prime Minister, was the finance minister at that time and he architected India's plan for liberalisation. Predictably, the Left, being the pseudo socialists that they are, revolted once more. KFC, one of the early entrants into India met with violent protests and packed up business soon after. 1991 was a turning point in India's history. Left claimed that the government was selling off the country. Ridiculous comparisons to the British Raj were made. Thankfully, Dr. Singh stuck to his guns and in less than a decade India rose to become a minor economic power with a healthy growth rate.

However, Narsimha Rao's tenure was marked with its own scandals. At this time, India also witnessed the biggest stock market scam in its history. The scamster, Harshad Mehta, was accused of bribing Rao to the tune of Rs. 10 million. It was claimed that a suitcase filled with bank notes was delivered to Rao. The popular topic of debate at that time was whether Rs 10 million worth of bank notes can be fitted into a suitcase!

In late 90s, the nascent Indian software industry sensed oppurtunity in fixing the Y2K bugs. Y2K was a yet another turning point. While GE had earlier proven that outsourcing to India worked well, it was Y2K which brought the Indian software industry into the limelight. Since then, India has seen greater political stability and rest is, as they say, history.

Ironically, the present Congress governemnt is backed by the Left! The very same people who vehemently opposed and criticized the Congress just a few years back are now supporting it. Yesterday's call for bandh was a grim reminder of what India went through not too many years back. I hope this time history will not repeat itself.

We have released an alpha version of an AJAX enabled module which allows online users on a Drupal powered website to send instant messages to each other. AJAX and other rich internet technologies are making possible stuff that was considered impossible within the browser till recently!

Ashish will be talking more about AJAX in Drupal in DrupalCon in Portland next month. He will also talk about the work we have done to incorporate groups into Ourmedia.

Microsoft Watch has an article giving a sneak preview into the list of new features included in Windows Vista Beta 1. Of personal interest to me was the following:

"A "Games Explorer," designed to list all the games stored on a user's computer, also will be part of Vista Beta 1. The Games Explorer will keep track of the last time each game was played, allowing users to sort or filter the display of games. This data is stored locally in the registry, and is not sent to Microsoft. When you open Game Explorer, it retrieves rich metadata about the games you have installed from the Windows Metadata and Internet Services (WMIS) at Microsoft"

This is the set of features that I worked on while at Microsoft. Actually there was much more to it but looks like some features got chopped off or maybe they will be revealed in Beta 2. Working with the Windows Graphics and Gaming Technologies (WGGT) group was great fun. Some of the things that we worked on and evnisioned were truly exciting. Gaming was (and I am sure still is) going to be a showcase feature for the Longhorn client. We used to play Unreal Tournament every evening and I totally got my ass kicked. WGGT is an incredibly passionate team and I learned about "loving your job" there. Working with such a great team had made leaving Microsoft even harder. I miss ya guys (but not your Star War jokes ;-))!

Microsoft has announced that the next version of Windows will be called Windows Vista. The product was code named Longhorn previously and this is what I had worked on for 3 years at Microsoft. I have to admit I am rather disappointed with the name chosen by Microsoft for Longhorn.

Firstly, Vista is an English word. And that too a word not used in common vocabulary (at least I have never used that word in a sentence before today). When somebody says "Vista", no picture comes to my mind. Morover, Microsoft earns more than 2/3rds of its revenue outside of North America. That means, a vast majority of Windows users don't speak English. So 'Vista' doesn't mean anything to them. If they wanted to really reach out to their biggest user base, they should have chosen a Chinese (Mandarin ?) word. Secondly, the word "Vista" is a fairly common trademark. A Google search returns names of several businesses and organization who use this word. So why pick a word whose branding is already diluted? Finally, for reasons that I myself don't comprehend, "Vista" doesn't sound sexy. XP, Xbox, ipod, flickr, vimeo sound cool and sexy but Vista kind of just represents the old fuddy-duddy image Microsoft has been starting to acquire of late.

I am curious what kind of reaction this name evoked within Microsoft. Of course in the Windows division, everybody will continue to call it "Longhorn" even years after it has shipped. Even today, everybody there refers to XP as Whistler (which was what XP was codenamed)!

Ourmedia has over 20,000 uploads now. Here is the breakdown as of today

Total media uploaded: 20045
Videos: 9633
Audios: 5966
Images: 3902
Texts: 544

We also crossed 30,000 users recently. So 30,000 users have uploaded 20,000 pieces of media. That indicates to me that we have a community that is very active. Its not like a lot of people came, signed up and then never returned. That has been an issue with social networks in general. With Ourmedia, we have a managed to create a social network which is focussed on a specific interest area and hence has retention.

We also did a major upgrade of Ourmedia a few days back. In particular now we support RSS with enclosures and media RSS feeds per user and also allow users to create their own groups. Come, join the Tekriti group!

Last few days have been such a deja-vu for me. It feels like Microsoft all over again at work. Having ever really worked in one company before, both Ashish and myself have only one example (a damn good one, if I may add) to go by on how companies are run. And Manish had spent almost a year in Redmond, so he is pretty much indoctrined to the Microsoft way as well. Slowly and almost sub-consciously, we have been practically replicating Microsoft dev practices here at Tekriti. Whether its things like requiring all code to be reviewed before getting checked in, or requiring "smoke" tests beofre resolving a bug, or bringing daily bug reports to the morning meeting (which we call "WAR" meeting), or having a MSFT style interview loop for hiring, or going to movies for morale events - its all starting to feel, in a good way, like Redmond, right here in Gurgaon! For all you know, we could have been a small product team working in building 9 and lot of things would have been same (well maybe there would be free soda, but no free lunch!)

A few days back I had blogged about the mini MSFT blog. But now you know where the REAL mini MSFT is :)

Last few days were quite a learning experience. On Friday, Ourmedia server went down and the site was inaccessible. At first look, it appeared that the apache logs had filled up beyond the 2GB limit. So we promptly reset the logs and the server was up again. Only to go down within half an hour. Memory usage climbed to 99% of available memory which caused mysql to crash. This led to a few corrupted tables as well. Which caused the apache error log to fill up very fast. Which caused apache to seg fault. Hence the vicious circle. It wasn't clear why we were getting this increased load all of a sudden. We did several restarts but within 30 mins, the memory usage would peak out and mysql would crash. More than a day went by like this with server load peaking within minutes and then requiring a restart.

Finally on Sunday, while skyping with Jeff (lead moderator for Ourmedia), we figured out what was happening. Jeff had freed up disk space day before yesterday by (rightly) deleting the temporary media files. But it looks like Google had indexed those images and/or people had linked directly to those images. In particular, an image of Lindsay Lohan was getting very high number of hits. Now with the image removed, Drupal (the CMS which is used by Ourmedia) started returning 404 errors which were getting logged into watchdog. Watchdog ended up with 6.8 million entries in a single day. I think that was causing excessive memory usage and mysql crashes. As a temporary fallback, I changed the code to stop logging anything into watchdog. Since then things have cooled down and we have a uptime of 30 hrs (and counting).

It was quite an experience in systerm administration - something that I have not done much before. The biggest lesson I learnt was that what seems like the obvious cause of a problem is often merely a symptom of something more serious underneath. We still haven't gotten to the bottom of this but now we know where to look!

Thanks Linday Lohan ;-)

PHM@

Looks like I might have deleted some comments accidently. I was getting very obscene comments on my old post about Sania Mirza. I dont like to moderate comments but this is not acceptable. So folks out there - please take it easy! Sania is NOT reading this blog. So please don't leave your proposals on my blog :)

Rediff reports that India is now 10th largest economy.

China and India are the only two so called "developing" nations in the top 10.

I was surprised to read that Dr. Manmohan Singh offically acknowledged the beneficial consequences of the British Raj on India. It is true that our structure of governance and education closely mirrors that of Britain. Another cosnequence of the British rule was the unification of princely states into one nation. Whether it was beneficial or not is difficult to say. For in the absence of colonial rule, India might have unified as a federation of states like US or even a loose federation of nation states like the European Union. Would that have worked better for us or not is a matter of speculation and debate.

However, in my opinion, it does not befit the Prime Minister to make statements of such nature. Sure, we are an English speaking nation today because of our colonial history and that has been to our tremendous advantage. And we have a free press which could be very tangentially attributed to our former British masters. We certainly learnt from the British and India owes its democratic roots to its colonian past. But contrast that with the atrocities like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the partition of India, the divide and rule policy and complete ruin of the domestic industry. The damage done by the British rule far outweighs the fringe benefits that Dr. Singh mentioned.

Anyhow, it has been almost 60 years since the British left and it is time to bury the past and look forward to business and political relationships as equals. However, even so, we should not disrespect our freedom fighters by calling the colonial rule a good thing.

Yesterday I indulged in Delhi's latest favorite pastime - riding on the Metro! The new line from CP started last weekend. 200,000 people showed up on the very first day - most to simply have a joy ride. The new line is completely underground while the Rithala to Shastri Park line is elevated. The third line from Dwarka to CP will start around Decemeber this year. The Dwarka Sect. 10 station on this line is walking distance away from my home so needless to say I am looking forward to it. The fare is around Rs 10 (25 cents) and that is probably the cheapest anywhere in the world.

The Metro project has been like no other government funded projects. Creating such a vast network for rapid trasnport in a chaotic and unplanned city of 15 million is no mean feat. Compound that with the fact that the Metro has been constructed wthin budget and ahead of schedule. What an amazing achievement! Biggest credit goes to Metro chief E. Sreedharan. Hats off to you, Sir!

Great news! Just a few months old, Ourmedia is already making world news! :)

There is so much talk about social networking these days and how everybody is trying to figure out a viable business model. Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Tribe all get talked and written about every day. But nobody mentions what I believe is the world's most successful social network. Its shaadi.com Its an Indian matrimonial site and has many social networking features. I heard their ad today on the radio and they claim that 500,000 of their members found their match on their website. That is NOT 500,000 dates, that is 500,000 marriages! If that is not successful, then I don't know what is.

Matrimony is big business in India and for a country with a very large foreign resident population, internet provides an easy way to connect with people back home. When it comes to marriage, trust becomes a key issue. Social networks have trust built into them. When you connect to somebody who is n degrees away from you, there are n-1 intermediaries (whom you trust) who can vouch for that person. Shaadi.com doesn't harness that trusted network. And I think that is an oppurtunity to create an interesting social networking application.

Ashok Uncle found the history behind the word "spam". I can breathe much easier now that I get only a couple of spam comments everyday. Whew, what a relief!

p.s: if you are suffering from comment spam on you movable type blog and want to hack your scripts like way I did, drop me a line at gauravbhatnagar at msn dot com.

hmm... $100 million fund focussing on RSS and social software startups.