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 :( )

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.

Fakecasting the WMT store sales

This just in from a friend of mine. You will absolutely love the cartoon, and hopefully be able to associate with what the story is with service providers in India. Just for a little background, my friend works in a very renowned and sought after business-analytics company (forbidden to name here), and he made this cartoon out of the funny (or frustrating) scene while he was working for a renowned client (I bet it is as renowned as a 4-year NRI kid to know :) ). The lady that you see in the picture was the client’s representative and the poor guys you see all over, were my friend and his colleagues. My friend aptly titled the cartoon as “SALES FAKECASTING”

I am a Technologist. I am a blogger. I am a kid (though not quite anymore :( ) growing up in the internet age. My niece will probably start typing on an iphone before she gets to the notebook. She will probably blog by the time she hits 4 (3 years, 12 months and 350 days from now), or maybe not. But she will be smart and tech-savvy and know how to get things easily and comfortably from the simple click of a mouse button.

I actually went a little too far in the future. The same story holds for my immediate juniors.

The fact that internet penetration has grown, and the web scene in India has really started to heat up, I still do not understand why job portals do not catch up with the trend. It’s not a new thing in the western countries. You can probably find tons of such, if you do a simple google search on job boards.

What is the feasibility of such a job board in India ?? Can we build a system which aims only at a specific vertical (say IT or Technology in general) and takes a different route to push the jobs to the seeker, rather than wait for the seeker to come across the opening. Why I say this is simply because I had the pleasure of hearing a talk of a marketing genius, where he said a few words like :

There are only two ways to market your product. Either you build a product that is so brilliant that it PULLS the customers; or you build a strategy to PUSH your product to the masses.

Now, traditional job boards have been here for a long time, and neither is there product any longer anywhere near to brilliant, nor are they building new products that are technologically more sound and meant for the coming generation (which is, by large, going to be very tech-savvy and very smart). The main revenue model for them now, is more or less, selling lakhs of resumes that they have collected over time to prospective employers. I can link to two such companies, that I personally know well, who had a rough time with these job portals…..here and here

Alternatively, these job portals also carry-on recruitment drives for larger companies, which are very indirect and lack any transparency. If I had to summarize, I would probably write down these negatives in these job portals :

• Lack of transparency - As a job-seeker, I am not kept in the loop, or probably a direct feedback is not available in most of the cases. I hate the fact that I cannot know as to what is the status of my application.
• What with the privacy policy and all these “New jobs matching your profile” or selling my resume ?? Was that mentioned anywhere that they will be selling my resumes, and I will be getting 10-15 spam mail daily to fill my ever-growing mailbox ??!!
• What happened to the job that I was actually looking for ?? It came and it went. It was not really pushed to me (remember unobtrusive ways only)
• For the employer - it’s more like spending enough money and not getting good resumes. Literally. I knew it in my college, that 99% of the population did not care to go to these job portals or submit their resumes. Or maybe, if and once out of desperation they did (and that too, with all the pain of filling up those lengthy forms, which is also one of the major problems) signup for the service, they never looked back to it. Which obviously, brings in the quality concern.
• The number of resumes maybe high, but as an employer, I need people who are currently actively looking for jobs. It’s like saying the same thing as any desi social networking site would - we have the numbers, but not the active ones.

I could probably go on blabbering about these job portals, and how they are really not upto the mark, for a country like India, where IT has become the second religion (after cricket obviously), but I am looking for some feedback on this first.

• Do you really thing job boards can change the system ??
• And maybe we can go a step ahead of traditional job boards and have a much better system in terms of ROI for both, the employer as well as the seeker (the I in ROI here can be anything, not just monetary value…take for example time for both of the parties to reach their goals) ??
• How can we really push the job openings to the right seeker and at the right time ?? Blogosphere, an advanced job-board-ad system ??
• How to pull the seeker instantly after pushing the job opening to him ?? Technically yes it’s possible. But how otherwise ??
• How to enable transparency for the seeker ?? Should the job board act as an intermediary, or just a third person watching from the sidelines (but with enough power to moderate any talk between the employer and the employee) ??

I know some of these questions might sound vague. But to a young mind, with ample energy, nothing seems to be trivial :)

It’s like a new baby has born inside me :)

It’s been exactly a month today since I first got my 16GB iPhone (after waiting for a week to get my preferred color - white), and I thought to do a small review on that.

First up, iPhone is NOT entirely meant for mobile addicts. Instead, as apple’s main business strategy, the focus always has remained on a particular segment of users who are tech-savvy, web-people just in love with this beauty. So, please no hard feelings if I contradict some of the popular notions about iPhone doing the rounds in the Indian blogosphere since it’s launch in August (or rather since it’s price launch).

• The iPhone is Sturdy - Believe it or not, the gadget only looks fragile and weak, but in reality it is pretty robust, and as in my case, it easily stands out falling on a very hard surface. I just happened to drop it on the floor, and literally stopped breathing for the time since it slipped out of my hand till I picked it up and noticed that it didn’t even have a scratch (forget the point of breaking the delicate beauty). I can say the same for any Nokia phone, but when it comes to Sony Ericsson, I am not too sure. I have had a similar experience with a Sony phone that I held previously, and boy-oh-boy it was a nightmare after that.
• No Bluetooth ?? - Not exactly. The iPhone supports bluetooth, but it does not support communicating with other similar devices apart from bluetooth headset, and maybe some other apple product. It is a definite problem, but in any case I have never used bluetooth too much for sharing and transferring data with my friends previously also. So, it really doesn’t make any difference to me, but it might (will) make a difference to a lot of people. Though the good news is that the bluetooth sharing can be easily achieved using software updates. So watch out for all the firmware updates from apple; we might soon have bluetooth in iphone, as like other phones.
• No custom ringtones too?? - Not exactly again. I have the starting guitar seconds of the song “pichle saat dino mein” as my ringtone. Although, it is a little tricky to set your custom ringtone. Either you have to buy a song from the apple store and then convert it into a ringtone (which will effectively cost you $1.98 for that!!) or you can have a software like “iPhoneRingtoneMaker” to do all the dirty little stuff for stuff while you sit back and just select your favorite song. But again, iPhoneRingtoneMaker will set you back by $8 one time. One can get the pirated software from anywhere on the internet for free. I actually did the same :)
• Battery Life is superb - Yes indeed. One full recharge will probably last for a maximum of day and a half if you are using the iPod a lot (as I do), playing games, browsing etc. Using it only as a phone, the battery lasts for an average 2 days.
• App Store ?? - A lot of apps. A lot of good apps (the point of my next article). And a lot of good apps for free
• iPod - Too good. The earphones just blast off with quality sound. All the music management is done by iTunes and synced to the iphone. A new update to iTunes is addition of a feature called “GENIUS”, which is basically a smart music suggestion system. You choose a song, and it helps build a list of similar songs that you may find interesting to listen to at that moment.
• Camera - The camera in the iPhone is just a mere 2mp camera, but effectively, the camera is equivalent to any 3.2mp camera in terms of picture quality. The iphone also lacks video capture, which is one of the biggest negatives for people who use the camera a lot to shoot videos (I do :) )
• The touch screen - It’s big ! It’s clear ! And it just moves on your fingers ! :) . In terms of the user interface and the design, nobody can actually beat apple right now (not even google with the G-Phone). The interface is just too intuitive to not to love it :)

Although the list is exhaustive, I just chose to write a few points that I felt were more important than a lot of others. So far, my experience with the iphone has been excellent (although if you plan to buy the iphone, then buy an LCD cover immediately, or the scratch marks will ruin the fun), and as a friend of mine asked me - “Do you recommend buying the iPhone ??” - my answer would be “Yes, if you are a connoisseur of beauty and design, or else just wait for six months and buy the phone for 25k”.

But really, whatever be the case, I do not expect the iPhone to be available for 16k. Those of you, who expect this, and are writing all s**t since it’s actual price was revealed, my only suggestion would be - do not try to judge beauty when you don’t know how to value it.

Yes, we all have watched his movies (and applauded some); tried to imitate his stunts and dialogues in childhood; witnessed a lot of new-age viral-campaigns involving him; and definitely love him for at least his dialogues if not for his acting (no offense to any Mithun Da’s fan reading this please).

Just came across this e-mail (forward you see are not all worthless after all (smiles) ), and really perked my day up for sure. So, here it goes, a small (yes definitely small !) list of dialogues sorted according to their rating, by the janta (good use of web-2.0 though !).

• ” Bheegi hui cigarette kabhi jal nahi sakti…..aur yeh tay hai ki teri maut ki taarikh tal nahi sakti”
• Mantriji:- “Ye kanch bullretproof hai. tum mujhe chu bhi nahi sakte”
  Mithun Da:-”Ye kanch bulletproof hai magar patthhar proof nahi”
  (and he breaks it by throwing stones on the glass)
• “Apuun ka naam hai HEERA,
  Apuun ne sab ko Cheera…”
• shetty: “kaun hai be tu?”
  Mithun da says-”Mai hoon tum jaise logon se nafarat karne wala,
  Garibon ke liye jyoti, Gundon ke liye jwala
  tuze banake maut ka Ek niwala,
  tere sine mein gaad dunga mai maut ka bhala.
  Mila doonga yamraj se tere ko salaaaa.”
• ” kyunki ab mein Indrajeet nahi……chandaal hoon
  tum chaho toh mera program note karlo
  …tum sab meri diary mein mar chuke ho!
  mein chahoo toh tum sabko abhi mar sakta hoon
  magar abhi maarne se tumhe maarne ka credit meri bullet ko mil jayega!!!! “
• ” Main hoon Do Numbri, ek se jyaada, teen se kam
  Dikhne mein bevda, bhaagne mein ghoda, aur maarne mein hathoda …. “
• ” Jitani tumane saanse li hongi, usase jyaada maine lashein girayi hai “

and yes, the crowd favorite (and my all-timer too :)) still remains,

Mithun da gets a bullet on his leg, Looks at the villain scornfully, calmly stands up and says-
“DUSHMANO KI LAASHON PAR BHANGRA KARNE WALA KABHI LANGDA NAHIN HO SAKTA”

P.S - If you cannot see the pun intended, then you ain’t a Mithun Da’s true devotee, and even if you have read this earlier somewhere, do not claim so, it will be hazardous :) to your profile.

This one’s good…really good I say. Try and think of the major driving force behind entrepreneurship - as to why you want to be an entrepreneur. Is it the money, fame, freedom, or anything else. What comes to my mind is what I can relate to with this quote.

“There is only one way to live life, and that’s my way”

Aye yo people. I’m happy. I’m gay. I just uploaded my new typo theme and now bishtblogs is running smoothly on rails. I happened to notice some changes with the rails or with my host, something that has led to my weblog running pretty damn fast. I always wondered whether any rails app runs smoothly on a shared hosting environment, but this time it seems (with rails 2.0) that it can. I have still not really gone into the stats (my logs et all), but for the naked eye, it seems that everything is up and running fine.

I still have not integrated my photoblog module with Typo, and I guess I won’t be able to do so for the coming week or two, since I’m off to bangalore tomorrow to meet some people. For the moment the area right under the left navigation that says “from the photoblog” is filled with two static photos (me and a friend of mine), which obviously will be made away once the photoblog module is integrated.

From the usability point of view as well, the top navigation, with all the links like “design”, “blog”, “love” and “the basement” are ajaxed, although when you try and open them, you do not get any status message as to what is happening behind the scenes. Pretty lame I say. But..but..things will be working in a jiffy asap when I get time again in a couple of weeks

Till then, please do drop by your feedback on anything and everything bad or good in here. Just mail me at sanjay AT bishtblogs DOT net. And I will do the rest

Great day..cheers!