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Next week I will be traveling to Calcutta to my in-laws place. Apartment Adda is live and I need to keep monitoring the servers, reply to support emails etc. and I cannot afford to be cut off. Also going to a cyber cafe is not an option - I am paranoid of key stroke loggers and what nots.  I did quite some research - USB cards, data access card - which were quite expensive for the 1 week access that I needed. Finally ended up trying Airtel GPRS. The speed is dial up - as advertised. My site loads up fast and I am able to SSH. That is all I will need.  You need a data cable for your phone - so you can use your phone as a modem. Then send the message "MO" to 6123 - this is a week plan for Rs 140 - unlimited usage. And when you want to stop the service send the message "MO CNCL" to 222. Simple isn't it? Also with the frequent power cuts I am facing - probably I will go for the 1 month plan - 100MB for 350Rs or so.  Thanks AR Rahman for the tune and Airtel for your ...

My of late favorite browser has become my regular browser once again. It has started showing alert boxes in pop up windows. This is of build 0.4.154.29. Enjoy !!

I have been following Seth Godwin for a while - he posts frequently, and each post teaches me something new. Here is a video of him giving a speech on creating a nucleus and building around it - and identifying tribes and telling them a story -  http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/the-seed-the-pi.html What I learnt? * You need to sell your service to the whole world. Identify a little group of people - and show them your service, tell them your story - they will spread the word for you - if they like it and your service is good. * Everything starts small - as a seed, as a nucleus. Hold on tight to it  - and start developing on it - working around it and slowly let it evolve. Much like the agile process that I follow - in many iterations - adapting and modifying according to the feedback and what the customer wants.

I am still fuming from the Mumbai carnage and hearing our politicians soundbytes. Felt it is bad for my blood pressure - so here is a post on a lighter vein - the cliches that media,politicians, pundits, commentators - keep telling on and on. 1. "Iraq is in the danger of going into a civil war." Knock knock - Iraq was in civil war from the very beginning since Dubya started his engagement 4 years back. Stop saying it and call what it is - civil war, failed state etc.  2. "We will give a fitting reply" This is what our Indian politicians say immediately after a bomb goes off somewhere. They have been giving fitting replies for the past 50 years. No one knows what the reply will be. Our youth leader has said Pakistan has slapped us and we should give a fitting reply. When asked what will that be - he says that is for the PM to give.  Dude don't pretend to be a leader come join me  in writing blogs - I can speak such things without giving any solution. 3. "Our...

The man on the left is the scape goat because of the incompetency of the following stalwarts. 1. Manmohan Singh 2. A.K.Antony. 3. Sonia Gandhi. Mrs.Gandhi has successfully placed "dummies" for Prime Minister, President, Defense Minister and Home Minister. 1 and 2 might be clean but that did not come of any good to handle crisis. I prefer a corrupt paan chewing bad guy who will make our enemies think twice before indulging in any such adventures. Venkat how can you say such a thing? I know I know - even if 1. and 2. are clean - the rest of 3,4...272 are  looting - remember the just concluded Telecom scandal  - Rs 60,000 crores swindled by a Swan technology and one more company - who never had any plans of selling mobile network - but got the spectrum from Mr.Raja for a measly sum and resold it within days to companies who wanted the spectrum badly.  So corruption will happen - its a serious cancer. But the wounds that are being inflicted now will bring us a quick death. It has...

Terrorists choose the wrong place and wrong time to strike. They have dug their own graveyard. Here is why.  1. It is election year . The in power, out of power, no chance of power - all politicians with half,quarter brain will be baying for terrorist blood. Any draconian bill will get passed this time in the assembly.  Of course the short term impact will be - the terrorists will look for alternative professions and lie quietly. The long term impact will be - too much power with police,army will backfire in the long run. Then a peace loving government will come to power and clip its wings. 2. Those idiots attacked business capital. In the past few years business lobbying has started growing. So now enough businesses ( I am counting on you feuding Ambanis, Tatas and Birlas) will lobby for tougher security - and the half and quarter brains will comply and pass the laws even if they do not understand a thing. And in another note :  We are  tired of our Neighbour  My great neighbour nex...

Art of starting... Well this is the name of my blog, inspired by a great book - Art of The Start by Guy Kawasaki.  I bought this book on Nov 27,2006. ( I write the day I bought a book with an interesting event that day if I had one ) - and read it half way. But never finished it - gave me lot of crazy ideas and inspiration. Now I picked the book again and re-reading from the beginning. And suddenly it makes sense - every word of it. Earlier when I read this book it was as if I was reading the syntax of a language in a book. Now when I read the book it is as if I am coding and compiling and running it.  If you are a wannabe entrepreneur, just starting like me, or a seasoned entrepreneur who eats VCs for breakfast - this is the one book you should have read back to back. 

I respect Mumbai more than Delhi. It is India's capital according to me - so many businesses, ideas, entrepreneurs have flourished here.  I got my coffee ready and picked up Indian Express and saw "Terrorists take over Mumbai" - I could not believe it. Thought it was a prank. Economic Times concurred. This is like a movie script. What is going on with our country? Knock Knock Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and Shivraj Patil - what are you guys doing? Enough of your vote bank politics and cuddling terrorists. Terrorists have gone from 0 to 1000s in the last 4 years - thanks to your inaction.  If you cannot deal with it - quit. Take with you the crores that you got from Telecom licences and what nots and go holiday in France or Swiss - I don't care. Leave my country alone - and let an able administrator take over. Cannot watch this country bleed slowly to death. 

I completed Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. After 1000 pages and sitting through the philosophical discourses by John Galt ( what a fabulous speech in the end), Atkinson - the philospher, Fransisco the Copper Barron, a pirate, a car manufacturer, a music composer - I am still in one piece and I still love humanity - more later. First Who is John Galt? This phrase gets asked by everyone in the book. John Galt is the intellectual who decides to stop the motor of the world - by withdrawing the forces that drive it - and he is successfull in doing so.  The whole story is about intellectuals going on strike . The intellectuals - producers,scientists,thinkers - are the one who are bearing the weight of this earth - like Atlas holding the earth. But they are not rewarded for what they deserve - the industrialists are accused of exploiting others for their wealth, the scientists are not rewarded for their inventions but ridiculed and stifled, the music composer is not appreciated "with the...

http://uitest.com/en/analysis/ Accessibility,SEO,Validation,Load Time

It has been almost 2 months since I stopped watching TV. With 2 exceptions - Followed Chandrayaan launch on the (t)rusty Doordarshan and saw  Obama creating history . Rest of the time I have shunned TV. Here is my top 5 things that I miss about TV. 1. Breaking News - yeah right. I do miss a whole lot of things that seem to break continuously round the clock.  2. Cricket - Oh I miss so much. During this time 4 test matches and 2 ODIs were played and I missed  the painful ecstasy of watching world's most boring entertainment and not to mention Rahul Dravid score 0 in 3 balls or Ganguly's o in 1 ball of his last match (don't take the knives out yet, my next post will be on Ganguly - in fact I like him a lot)  3. Movies laden with Ads  -  A good hollywood movie will take 3 hours with all the ads strewn  inbetween. I really miss the analysis I do with all the products and advertisements that are shown between the movies - so I can plan the next unwanted purchase and help the ...

Site24x7.com This is a very useful free resource. They let you monitor up to 2 websites free. Also they send a weekly report about your site uptime and performance. This is just one of the many free services that are available which we can take advantage of. 

So I was wondering how does Apartment Adda look like on different browsers, different platforms - is it loading fine or is it throwing errors? Head over to browsershots.org and give your url. It will take some time but your site is hit with 61 browsers from all the OS platforms of the world. I got my results back with errors on an old version of opera and chrome.  The entire development of Apartment Adda has been done on chome with occasional switch to firefox to use firebug. Need more investigation - you can download the results to your desktop and view each one of them carefully. Very useful service.

I am happy to announce the launch of ApartmentAdda.com - it is an online portal for communication and management for apartment communities.  Today most of the apartment communities network online using yahoo groups or google groups. Apartment Adda is a replacement to these groups and in addition provides more tools custom built for apartment communities - like notice board, file sharing, polls and also management tools like maintenance fee tracker, issue tracker etc. It is close to 2 months since I started working on this. Has been quite a roller coaster ride. Had to take care of legal aspects, UI design, logo, the mantra, features page - it is endless !! Is my work over? -no in fact it is just beginning and things are getting really interesting !!  Head over to apartmentadda.com and see if it can benefit you. It sure will !! 

I am happy to announce the launch of  www.ApartmentAdda.com . It is an online portal targetted at apartment communities. Today most of the apartment communities network online using yahoo groups or google groups. Apartment Adda is a replacement to these groups and in addition provides more tools custom built for apartment communities - like notice board, file sharing, polls and also management tools like maintenance fee tracker, issue tracker etc. I have been working on this portal for the past 2 months.  Some major milestones !! October 2007 - Registered apartmentadda.com domain Then Prithvi was born and I got busy in a couple of projects.  September 17, 2008 - Work begins on Apartment Adda September 28,2008 - Prototype demo to Oasis Breeze Apartment's Association Committee Oct 5,2008 - Early Beta release - Oasis Breeze, Harmony Apartments sign up Nov 12,2008 - Launch Head over to the site and have a look - www.apartmentadda.com . I feel very excited and nervous !! Perhaps this is...

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 :)