I recently had a great opportunity to write something about startups at pluggd.in, and which I had to accept (I mean who lets such great opps to pass by :) ).

So I wrote about some of the points that I realized one should ideally do a reality check about, before joining a startup. And as it turns out, and as I had imagined before starting off, this really pissed off some of the startup janta (to say, the employers..a.k.a founders, co-founders).

It actually is a very debatable topic, and as an employee, I could probably argue till death with all those startup guys who thought the post was “misleading”. Actually it’s funny how these guys call it “misleading”. Aahhh…so much for the buzzword “startups, entrepreneurship and the eco-system” where employers always want it their way…huh..!

Read the whole story here at pluggd.in

After a little more than 100 days, and the loss of google pagerank from 3 to 1, I’m finally back to blogging. Not that it made any difference to anyone (nor to the 2 subscribers that I have, out of which admittedly I, myself am the first one), but more out of an eagerness to write, to speak out my mind, and to just write some random stuff, as always.

This time though, I thought I’ll probably market my new venture that I started a few weeks back. It’s a simple web application design and development studio, titled randomly as Popbugs.com, and when I say simple, I mean to stress on the word - SIMPLE (more on the simple story in later posts). And fortunately, in just our first week, we have managed to find 2 good projects and client - with whom we hope to build a strong and lasting relationship.

In any case, if you happen to visit the popbugs website, you’ll be delightfully greeted by some random chick, who we thought of naming as Pop. Beyond that there is not much that you can do right now, but in case you are looking for some web application design / development / deployment on Rails / JAVA, then shoot me a mail asap at sanjay AT bishtblogs DOT net, and I’ll get back to you in a jiffy.

popbugs.com logo

popbugs.com

Anyways, next few articles will probably brief on why the name of Popbugs, or why even we call it SIMPLE, or why the chick is too loud, or why the logo is made of eggs :)

P.S - I’ve actually started to understand why my managers at TCS (some time back I was in this s**t-hole), used to talk the way they did - the way I do now. Aah…crap

Infectious logo

Ok. My new year gift to myself. A brand new infectious art for my iPhone. Aahh…it’s a stunner of a design art.

You should go out and check some cool art for your iPhone, laptops, cars or maybe even your office / home walls. And if you need a neat 10% off your purchase, then use the coupon code “chipmunk” (good through 6/1/09 only).

Just a few screenshots - the before and after story :P

My iphone before

After pimpin' my iphone with infectious art

Let Mozilla break all the records as the most downloaded browser, curse Internet Explorer for anything (everything) as a developer and crib as much as you feel like, but the fact remains the same. Internet Explorer still is the most-used web browser.

Through techcrunch, I stumbled upon this report, which clearly shows the bigger picture. As a developer, use all the hacks you can to make things work in IE, but do it definitely. As a web developer, I myself have had tons of occasions when I wanted to simply through IE out of my system, and code for Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, et all. The times it gives me a headache to code for 3 different browsers is almost equivalent to the times I get a headache when I code for IE. Ahh…I wish Microsoft could understand my plight. Amongst all the things that could have been better, some are:

• Imagine no specific hacks for writing cross-browser css. One style-sheet to work for all :)
• Javascript. Life !! Debugging. Cakewalk !! But the best thing would be that DOJO would work all it’s magic. Specifically Dojox. A minor problem resulting in a major issue with dojo gfx in internet explorer is here. If this would have worked, I swear I would have never touched flex at all.

Where is microsoft ?? Are you guys listening? Do something about IE, and save us, the developers, of the unnecessary / extra work to make our neat and clean code work on your pathetic browsers. (Sigh :( )

The iphone app store (for India) has some really pretty awesome apps, both for fun and work. Some of the apps that I’m literally addicted to on my iphone is “YouNote”, “Parking Lot”, “Air Sharing” and “Fring” (more on the best apps available on the Indian app store, coming in a different post).

But there is just one little app, that I find missing on the app store. Maybe it won’t be use to a lot of people, but it is certainly useful to me.

The idea is simple. The app lets me set my to-do things, and then just reminds me on time. Nothing great. Except that it should be distance-based, and not time or date based. Or if possible, on the basis of time left to reach my destination. A simple example : I live in Bangalore these days, and visit delhi once in about 4-6 months, but I never know exactly when, and most of the ticket-booking is all done at the last moment. So, effectively, I don’t really have much time to check up on things before leaving. So, when I reach delhi, and am about say 5 kms from my home, this app should remind me of things I need to do; i.e, clean up my messages, remove the indecent stuff :P , etc. Yes, and obviously, this could be better, if this app could determine my instantaneous speed (based on some past data and some heuristics) and tell me that i’ll probably reach home in 10 minutes, so this cleanup is a real priority now :D

If given a chance, I would probably be using this app almost everyday. Telling me to wake up 5 minutes before I reach the office in the mornings, or home in the evenings. I could watch even more movies late nights, having the luxury to catch up on my sleep in the mornings and evenings :)

Anyways, this might not be a great app, but it sure is definitely better than a lot of crap and useless ones on the app store these days. Is anyone listening ???

I’m not really a great blogger - i’m not even a good writer. There are tons of blogs coming up daily, and truly 99% are crap (in the sense of the writing style, and how the ideas and facts are laid out…totally random…highly illogical..etc), and the rest 1% are like this (which I just totally adore because of the way Rahul puts his ideas…logical..humorous…sarcastic..superb).

Just one of the reason (that I personally feel) is the inability of people to jot down their thoughts exactly as they have in their head, on paper. It’s no surprise then, why a SOP is mandatory in a lot of B-Schools.

With google coming out with it’s speech-to-text app for iPhone, there is something there for not-so-great bloggers too. Something that they should be really happy about.

Simply imagine a blogging platform, where you log in to the admin section, click on the new post tab, and just start speaking what you have in your head. This approach has atleast 2 benefits

• Firstly, for this you will not have to keep track of your ideas on a paper, before making a post about those. What you think, is what is blogged. Great.
• Secondly, the time to write a blog post (which is undoubtedly pretty damn long for a meaningful and good post - I nearly quit twice before completing this useless and directionless post) decreases to a minimum - equivalent to the time you spend thinking over it. The jotting down the points, then a rough draft and finally the proper post is gone forever. Great again

While this is something very difficult, because since eternity, speech-to-text has been one of the toughest problem of Artificial Intelligence and self-learning algorithms, this is certainly not impossible. So while Google may think about it in the future, but till they do so, if you are a great dreamer, an aggressive entrepreneur, and most importantly have lots of moolah and courage to stand against failure also, this may turn out to be one of those killer ideas to change the world (i.e. what google and youtube did :D )

Over the years, the web has been immensely revolutionized, with a lot of rich content, browsers that are capable of displaying rich media, technologies such as AIR effectively taking and web app seamlessly to the desktop, data mining and data exchange taking place across domains in a second, and a host of other things.

While web designers, developers, bloggers, et all do stress a lot on usability, still majority of the work is done for the humans - people who can use their eyes and make sense of the data. For search engine crawlers/bots, making sense of data still remains an uphill task, and not everyone is interested in utilizing the power of search engines effectively. Or to state in different words, nobody cares as to what the search engine bot makes out of the data; it is Google’s, Yahoo’s, et all’s problems to make sense of the data. So, we feel good when google starts indexing Flash content, and are happy with the google webmaster tools for our website (no doubt it gives any site a relatively better SE ranking in a couple of months)

But, there is this small little thing called Semantic Web - which although most of the people know about, unfortunately nobody is interested in implementing or coming to standards with it. For bloggers, there is something called Structured Blogging which obviously seems to have got extinct these days with the fact that there are not many people ready to get along easily. Then there is Microformats which helps you semantically mark up data on your website. There are tons of other formats that are used to mark up your data in a way that makes sense of it to the search engine bots. But, still these technologies are not mainstream. Maybe now that yahoo has started the open search initiative, we might find smarter developers devoting some time to semantic web, the search engines, and making sense of their data to crawlers.

And as for the benefits - just read through this post on Yahoo search blog, regarding the goods. There are tons to be benefited from. And do not forget to check out the live examples - especially the LinkedIn example :)

Yes, that’s what Django means in Romanian language (source:wikipedia) - I awake. And, I just woke up to python and djnago :)

On the point of “Why to python from rails” - the new project that me and my friends are going to develop in the coming few months (brainstorming still) is going to be awake on django. This just because my friends are already awfully fond of python and django, and as you say, India is a democratic country, and the majority votes win the candidate. So, my candidate (RoR) was beaten hands-down this time around :(

Anyways, getting django-1.0 along with python-2.6 to install and run was not a really big problem (on my Vista machine too), though out of envy I would still say that RoR is easier to setup :)

Anyways, more on python and django in my later posts

Quick post here.

I own a few domain names that I had bought earlier, and now due to my new project, I am in great need of finance asap. So I decided to sell one of the domains that I own.

Timesofblogs.com is a premium domain if you are looking to do anything for the blogging world in the blogging world :) . I initially wanted to set up an online blogging magazine, on the lines of some great magazines like ALA, SM, etc. But due to the time constraints, I’m unable to give in much effort in this project right now. Anyone willing to do this, can go ahead. This is a really lucrative area right now, with wordpress openly saying that it is registering at least a million blogs every month. So obviously, anything aimed at that large crowd will gain traction pretty quickly.

In case if you are interested, or your friends are, then just spread the word around. Mail me here, along with your price, and we will discuss things out.

The obsession of internet

Another set of cartoons from my analyst-cum-recently-turned-cartoonist friend Shikhar Vaibhav. This time, it’s on the topic of “Too much obsession with the e-world”. Ehe, I just had to tell him to not make such cartoons anymore; he’s literally fooling with our jobs - the web people :D

Cheers for this set of cartoons again, for capturing the exact notion of what is happening in the world these days. I am actually convinced I should take a break and play some football over the fact that I spend almost 16 hours each day over the internet :)