kvrlogs

Am I the only one noticing this? I have a pop up page which shows a confirmation dialog - it used to work with the earlier Chrome version. But the current chrome version ( 0.3.154.9 ) does not show the confirmation message. The confirmation messages shows up fine in Firefox, IE ( holy guacomole ),Opera and Safari.  Weird.

Michael Chrichton passed away on Nov 4, 2008. A salute to a great author with a great imagination.  His books that I relished. Jurassic Park Enjoyed it for the chaos theory and he inducted me into fractal world. Disclosure Picked this book in the middle of my 3rd year exams. Started reading at 2.00PM and put it down at 3.00AM the next day.  ( thankfully I had a day between exams). Eaters of the dead I don't remember much about this book but for one interesting anecdote in the book - the length of a man's nose determines the length of his..you can guess :) The Great Train Robbery Chaltahai book. Nothing is sticking on my brain now.  Prey Introduction to Nano technology. But kind of predictable and got boring towards the end. Airframe Marketing said you will never fly an aircraft after you read this - but my memory is too short so it did not matter !! Movie adaptations that I enjoyed. Sphere I made the cardinal sin of seeing this movie and then regretting later that I saw this mo...

I always wondered what it takes to start a business in India. Turns out that it is quite simple - no big bureaucratic red tape which I always thought India was. There are 3 major types. Sole Proprietorship: This is what I opted for. Nothing to register with the government, lawyer or auditor. You are fully responsible for your business. Liability is solely yours. What it means is you incur a huge loss - you have to pay from your personal property. You wake up in the middle of night and decide - man let me start a business. There you go - your business is born. As simple as that. Want to open a bank account. No problem - tell them your company name and give address proof and PAN card number. Done. Till 2 Lakhs of income, you pay 20% tax. Beyond that it is 30%. Partnership: You need help from an auditor for this purpose. You and your partner(s) decide what is the percentage you own the company ( and hence the liabilities ) etc. Costs some 5000Rs I guess. I did not dig deep into this as t...

Good luck Senator. I hope you win the election and by next week you are Mr.President .  Here are the reasons why I support this young man. 1. Obama is young and is experienced enough. If W can be President, Mr.Obama - editor of Harward Law Review - can very well be. No arguments. Shut up Mc.Cain and Palin . 2. I am an admirer of Clinton. I love to listen to him. Obama is another great orator of our times. Give him a chance to speak to the world. 3. This is kind of a hope. Currently I am reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and there is a striking similarity to the story and our present day crisis. I n the story all innovation wasstifled . The industrialist who invents a new alloy, another one who invents a new way of drilling oil - all are hounded by the establishment ( Washington, old way of doing business guys, incompetent scientists ) - to not prosper with their innovation. In fact these new ideas are killed unceremoniously citing various reasons.  Roll forward 70 odd years and t...

I have a 10 month old son - and he keeps me occupied all the time I am at home -and I am at home all the time !! Whenever he is up he tries to grab the chords. He is fascinated with the optical mouse and keeps turning them upside down to see if the light is still on. He just does not get bored of it. Whenever he enters the room after a nap, or after his feeding battle - he gives a big smile. And I have to smile back at him. And of course the other times when he is doing something really crazy and I will silently smile inwardly without distracting him.  And of course all these smiling sessions will be punctuated with lot of blood curling cries - when he bangs himself on the door,wall,chair - in fact you start noticing how many hard objects are around you. And when he gets sleepy and does not want to sleep. His motor skills go for a toss and he will make any Bangalore policeman suspicious.   Someday will introduce you to him - he is a great guy :)  

More funny bot probes..  File does not exist: /home/****/html/intl client sent HTTP/1.1 request without hostname (see RFC2616 section 14.23): /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:)  script '/home/*****/html/thisdoesnotexistahaha.php' not found or unable to stat [Wed Oct 22 03:24:11 2008] [error] [client **.**.**.***] script '/home/*****/html/cmd.php' not found or unable to stat

Morning today I woke up to see Chandrayaan lifting off on our trusty Doordarshan. What a feeling it was. There was cloud cover so did not quite get the majestic spectacle of a rocket firing on all cylinders - but instead had to watch a dull 2D representation of a dot moving through a graph paper with the rockets speed slowly increasing - 4.8Km/s and so on.. A few minutes after launch when all the boosters had done their job, and the satellite was safely tucked away in orbit around the earth a mic was put and all the scientists got behind it and one by one started congrajulating their team. The 3rd to speak was one gentleman who was so emotional that he said " i dont know what to say " and his eyes were moist. And he did went on to congrajulate all his team members. I was waiting for some sound bite where some scientist will say take that you NASA or take that for calling us land of snake charmers and call centers - but none. All of them were such sophisticated gentlemen and ...

I have every reason to be proud of India. A mission to the moon. I am awaiting eagerly for this historic lift off tomorrow. When the rovers scooped dirt on Mars I was proud to be a human being - from swinging from branch to branch - and now to hopping planets  - what a giant leap mankind has taken. Also was teeny weeny jealous of NASA for having achieved such a big feat But when a Made in India  metal starts orbitting the moon, it will be doubly special. We have squeezed a rocket from pinching poverty, corrupt netas, terrorism, border disputes, pollution, suppression of minorities - it is an endless list. But for the common man beaten up by all these bad elements - the lift off will be one uplifing feeling - to encourage him to fight off all these cancers and rise above the clouds to achieve bigger things.  ISRO - a salute to have dared to think beyond 36,000KMs. What is next?

I was researching on a ajaxy table edit and stumbled upon this useful site - ajaxdaddy.com

The server is kind of up - not yet open to the public but the bots know about it already.  I always keep checking the error logs for such abnormalities.It helps a great deal if you clean all the warning messages your Application is throwing - this way the errors that come up in error logs are genuine and you can monitor your server better. Wondering if I should invest some time in a script to have a look at these logs - see if a "file does not exist" error happens in error_log and then take the ip address and see what got accessed in access_log - to see if the system is compromised. On the below code scroll to the right to see the bot's probes. [Mon Oct 20 01:39:29 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/README [Mon Oct 20 01:39:29 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde [Mon Oct 20 01:39:29 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde2 [Mon Oct 20 01:39:29 2008...

Senator Obama and Senator Mc Cain meet each other on the eve of the November Elections. Both are in a generous mood. BO : Hey John. I thought a lot about the past few months and I want to apologize for all the things I told about you. JC :  Same here. I too want to apologize. I should have treated  you like one of my grand sons.  OB : Anyway, coming to the heart of the matter, I want to withdraw from the Presidential race. JC : Hain?  You crazy or what. You are leading the charts, go ahead it is your cake. Eat it. OB : Well I think only you can handle the economy and war and all that. I am still a bachoo you see compared to you. So please become the President. JC : My dear grand son listen to me. I do not want any part of it. I just joined the Presidential race because I was bored. The Bushs had made sure no republican will ever win the election in his lifetime.  I joined the race because lot of people are dependent on this circus - media, my friend Bill O'Reilly..and also my autob...

With the US and Europe banks falling like bowling pins all around, I keep hearing - this is only the tip of the ice berg - I do question myself - Is it wise to start up now? So I keep my eyes peeled for any news on startup and recession  in the same line. Here is a an article on how its good to start a startup during recession.  For hackers - your competition is less. You cohackers and competitors are probably hanging tight to their jobs or going to join a job or doing their degree.  Also things will be cheaper during recession. And Apple,Google,Microsoft all started on a recession. For investors - buy when the market is bad. Invest in start ups now - against conventional wisdom - so when market picks up and start up is not start up any more - you reap better rewards.  Thats what I read ( I read what I want to hear :D)  - you can make your own views from the article. Paul Graham's why to start up on a bad economy

I am half a bong so I can talk about myself. So dont throw fish bones at me. Chew them instead ;) In the last 2 weeks 2 important events happened in West Bengal.  Nano moved out and Ganguly puts his stinky feet up. These 2 are isolated incidents and both happen in different sections of the newspaper - business and sports. However I read both and since the events happened close by I have to connect the 2 dots.  Ganguly - love him or hate him he does hold a mind space among us. There is this IndiaWatchDogs website which was born 3 years back mainly because of Ganguly ( to talk on how to throw him out of the Indian team ).  Or the 100000hours of coffee time that bored techies talk about Dada - for and against. Ganguly has done a great service in entertaining the masses. A salute to him. And of course he has scored some runs in that boring game called cricket - which I have striken off from the list of things that I classify as sports.  Nano - I am waiting eagerly for it. Its like linux -...

I stumbled upon this nice post about the tech choices we have. Resonates with my earlier post about PHP - how its good as a prototype bring it out fast language but needs to be re written in Java in the long run. http://www.cio.com/article/193750/You_Used_THAT_Programming_Language_to_Write_What_

My budget is for the stationery that I added - not the gizmos I had painstakingly collected over these years - that will be my next post - the stuff that runs on electricity. Whats in my home office 1. Stickies - 40Rs 2. Color sketch pens - 20Rs 3. World Map - 200Rs 4. India Map - 150Rs 5. LIC diary - 0Rs ( given free by my agent ) I do miss having a white board but it is prohibitively expensive - a decent sized one costs 4000Rs - and also the white board markers are not cheap either. The backside of the maps are very effective card walls - stickies cling on to them nicely. And I can move the card wall easily. Now I have a visual progression of my project. You are wondering what is a card wall? It is a must have in any agile project - it visually depicts the "stories" waiting to be played, being played, the ones that are in QA's desk and the ones that have been passed by the QA. In the first week I did not have the card wall and my partner ( Sangeeta - my wife who is su...

I have decided to build the online portal in PHP, supported by Apache, MySQL hosted on Linux. The most cliched LAMP model.  Did I consider other players? * Ruby on Rails : It was very much on my plate. I have done small utilities ( a server status monitor and a code snippet repository ) in rails and was blown away by the speed and simplicity of doing things. However 2 things went against RoR. ORM : My last project was a .NET project on Hibernate. It was a 2 year old project and already it felt like a legacy application with things tuned for performance to the maximum. They had crossed the return on investment period of Hibernate ( when relations stay simple at the beginning of any project ) and now were paying heavily for having Hibernate - performance, complexity, things moving to stored procedures..the usual pain points. So active Record did not interest me - being a one man army I did not want battles couple of months from now when I have to hack to implement a feature. Server supp...

Who am I? I am a "techie" who lives in Bangalore. But now I have taken a break to embark on a journey - auspiciously on the day Lehmann Brothers went bankrupt, Goldmann Sachs got degraded and blood bath happened in Wall Street. A journey to explore what it is like to go on your own - to be your own boss and create a business. Currently I am building an apartment management plus residents communication portal targetted at mid to large sized apartment complexes.  Its an alternative to yahoo groups, google groups and orkut that most of the residents use for apartment related communication.  Who this blog is for? I have been toying with the idea of starting something on my own for quite a long time. Have read lot of blog posts, books and finally now I have taken the plunge. I intend to help out the souls who want to take the plunge - share my experience and learnings in this new life of mine. Also inviting ideas, tips, tricks that you think might help me in my quest.  Also, to ke...

Now I have to reschedule all my appointments because of this...ughh.. " Thank you for your interest in Google Developer Day India.  Due to huge demand we unfortunately have run out of space and are unable to accommodate your registration this year.  We encourage you to check out our new APIs and Developer Tools on code.google.com . Hope to see you next year. Sincerely, Google Developer Team"

"As we are hurtling through space at the rate of 67,000mph ( milky way's velocity), in one corner of a small blue planet, in a small 3BHK apartment in Bangalore - there is this guy who has decided to take a plunge into the unknown. ThoughtWorks was generous enough to offer him a 3.5 month off time from work to try out some of the ideas he always wanted to work on." Of course - the guy above is yours truly and I am relishing every moment of it. It has been 12 days since I stopped attending daily stand ups and work commutes. I wanted to write about this on day one but suddenly things got super crazy from day one and never found time to make this announcement.  Right now I am in the middle of building this online portal for apartment neighbourhoods.  I have completed the ground floor - still 3 more floors to complete :) We are aiming for Oct 20th release if everything goes fine. Wondering who "We" is - it is Sangeeta of course joining in my crusade. She is continui...

Thank you Windows. Thank you. You wasted half an hour of my precious * time because I thought the flash drive was faulty. This is another reason why you should have a linux system to make sure the flash drive can still flash. The problem was I had mapped a network drive as E: ( C: the only partition and D: being my dvd drive). Now when the flash drive was plugged in it wanted to take the place of E: and not increment to F: as any sane human being and a pig wearing lipstick would have expected.  I had to blink finally by pushing the network drive to z: and then the flash drive showed up with a smirk on E:. precious *:   Today is the first day of my unpaid Leave of Absence from ThoughtWorks. Working on a business idea that is going to change the world and bring world peace and prosperity.