Deej Guide to Life, Universe and Everything I Don't Know About

Startups

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Sat, 28 May 2011 02:26:37 PDT

Some say that we are in an information bubble, startups which have no business model/revenue are getting funded on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. Others say that startups are fueling innovation and creating value and they are the new model of doing business. I do not take either side. There is some hype but one cannot deny the innovation and new ideas being implemented as a result.

Lets take a look at a few startups that have been in the news and try to predict about their success/failure. I will come back to this post an year later to see if any of my predictions turn out to be correct:

1. AirBnB: This site allows you to rent room in your house to potential visitors. They have over 50000 potential listings and 20 million connections and have recently raised 7.8 million dollars in funding. The site is decent, provides good value and already has a good userbase in US atleast. Will be in business an year later.

2. Rovio: A gaming company which has created the famous game: Angry Birds. Recently received $42 million in Series A funding and has 4.2 million dollar profit in second half of 2010. Although, Angry Birds is a great game; but it is very hard to replicate success in gaming industry again. Also, they are not providing any value apart from letting users kill their time. So a question mark from my side and angry birds looks like a temporary phenomena. Maybe they will still be doing strong business next year, if they are able to replicate angry birds.

3. Flipkart: An indian Amazon site which provides great experience and cash on delivery. It has taken only one round of funding of about 10 million dollars and has a revenue of 20 million for year 2010-11. It is growing very fast and provides a huge value to customers. I believe this will be a strong success one year later as well.

4. Tumblr: An easy blogging site which provides easy blogging and is more like a cross between Facebook pages and Wordpress/Blogger blog hosting websites. Do not think that this provides any additional value over what is already present. It got a funding of 30 million dollars with no revenue model whatsoever. Should be a failure unless it adapts.

5. StackOverflow: This is a programmer Q&A website. They have expanded to build other communities as well. They do not have a great revenue model but provide tremendous amount of value not being provided by any other company in this domain. This site should keep on working and expanding their business. They have received 18 million dollars in two rounds of funding till now.

So for me, a startup even if it doesn't have a revenue model, should create enough value for its customers to be a successful one.

The Chinese American Debt Cycle

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:25:15 PST

If you have watched the currency videos by Khan Academy then you will gain nothing new from this post. This post is essentially a summary of what Khan discussed in those videos.

Lets assume that there are only two merchants in the market. A Chinese doll manufacturer who sells 1 doll per dollar and there is a demand for 100 dolls in US Market. Then there is a US Cola manufacturer who sells cola cans at also 1 dollar and there is a demand for 50 cola cans in China. Now lets assume that 10 yuan is equivalent to 1 dollar. Now, there will be 50 * 10 = 500 yuan in market but there will be 100 dollars to trade for it. Thus, the price of Yuan should increase.

But the Chinese central bank wants to keep Yuan devaluated. In this case, they will print more yuans and buy back dollars. Thus, they will get the excess 50 dollars for printing 500 Yuan. Now, they will exchange these 50 dollars for US Treasury bonds. Since, the Chinese central bank has a lot of US dollars, it will keep buying US Treasury bonds at low interest rates thereby making all debt in US cheap.

As the debt becomes cheap, US Government will spend more money and consumers will spend more. And these consumers will pay more for each other's services thereby increasing labor costs. And also they will buy more cheap chinese products. The cycle is hard to reverse. The Chinese government cannot stop printing money; because if it does so, the value of US treasury bonds will erode as the yuan goes higher against dollar. And while the US kept getting its manufacturing base depleted and having its whole economy financed with cheap debt; it will find it very hard to adjust to expensive debt will little or no manufacturing base. Thus, although both the parties are trying hard to reverse the situation, China needs to keep printing more money till a balance is achieved.

If you see the graph between Chinese Yuan and American dollar, you will see a very controlled currency by China here. They have been slowly inflating their currency as the Chinese Market has become more mature and started consuming more of the products they produce.

The Hindu Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:14:20 PST

I have recently listened to a lot of pundits/brahmins/agents to god. Some of them offer various levels of services (depending on the amount of money you can shell out) to assure moksha for your loved ones. Well, I am not annoyed too much by their greediness. They need to live life too and they are giving you a peace of mind in exchange for money. Its perfect business. But I am much more concerned about the dangerous ideas that they are propagating.

According to Hindu Philosophy, one has to go through "eight hundred and forty thousand" rebirths as different animals and plants before one gets a chance to be human. Everyone gets 4 births as human: shudra (lowest caste only fit for doing cleaning jobs etc), vaishya(businessman), shatriya(warrior and ruling class) and above all a brahmin(devotees of god). If one does not follow the righteous path, he has to again go through the full cycle of 840000 births before getting another shot at being human. And this goes on forever. If however, one does follow the righteous path and prays to god everyday, he gets Moksha. Moksha is a state where you are free from this incessant cycle of birth and death and you live in paradise with God forever.

There seems to be an inherent problem in this philosophy. This assumes that living is painful, and our only aim while living should be to pass a test so that we are not given the punishment of living again. Moksha is a state of absolute happiness, stillness and calm; where nothing happens. Whereas life: life is full of emotions, attachments, pain, hunger; and all this is bad. God gave you life as punishment. You are not actually living. According to this philosophy, nobody is living. All you are doing is paying for all the bad karma you did in your imaginary previous lives.

If one really sincerely believes in this philosophy, will there be a point left in living? Do you really want your society to believe in the futility of living and work for a cause which makes us stop living. What kind of society will that be?

Disclaimer: Hindu philosophy is used in a loose sense based on what is being preached by various brahmins today. There are various sects and branches of Hindu Philosophy which are all different.

Impact of Delhi Metro - An Amateur Study

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 02:01:14 PDT

One day while I was standing on a metro platform overlooking the road below, I conducted a following study. (Please note that my sample set for this study is 10 minutes of observation with only my eyes and a mobile with a stopwatch application)

Traffic at a red light intersection in a single direction:

Time taken for a single redlight : 107 seconds (41 seconds red, 66 seconds green)
Number of 2 wheelers : 153 (average over 3 samples)
Number of 3-4 wheelers : 75 (average over 2 samples)
Number of Buses : 2 (average over 4 samples)

If we assume, that the number of people travelling on 2 wheelers are 1.3 persons per vehicle and number of people travelling in 4 wheelers around 2 people per vehicle. Lets assume that each bus carries around 75 passengers as well. ( Note that I do not have any data to support these assumptions. But this is based more on gut feeling and can be gross approximations) then number of people travelling per 150 seconds will be:
(153 * 1.3 + 75 * 2 + 2 * 75) * (150/107) = 498.8 people

Also, during this time, a metro comes every 2 minutes stopping for 30 seconds at the metro station. Each metro has around 4 compartments and each has sitting capacity of 50 and standing capacity of 292 passengers. Thus each metro has capacity of 1506 passengers and in peak hours it usually exceeds that. For conservative estimates, lets assume that metro carries 1000 people.

So, if there was no metro in Delhi, we would have needed to make the roads triple in width everywhere...

UPDATE: Credit to Ankur to point me to right figures about metro coach capacities.

Beware of the barrenness of Busy Life

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:01:49 PDT

Although, I thought of writing 21 posts in the next 21 days; but never got to it. So, my 21 day challenge was a failure. But who do I blame it on? Busy Life. And yes, that is the topic of this blog post.

After going into job, life has become busy! I am finding myself telling the old excuse of being busy to everybody which I so used to hate when I was a child! As a child, its very hard to imagine someone as busy. As an adult, with each and every minute of your life planned, you still cannot recollect as many moments of life as a child would. A child is free, yet his life is never barren.

Take this pop quiz:

Are you caught up in perpetual activity such as habitually checking news every hour, email every half an hour, facebook updates every 10 minutes, or answering random ims every minute or so.
If somebody asks you to describe your typical day, the only answer which comes to your mind is: Home - Office - Home
Do you find yourself getting a kick out of multi-tasking. You are one of those people who reads newspapers in toilets, along-with breakfast or while travelling to work.
You have not thought about what you want to achieve in life in the past 1 month

If answer to any of these questions is a yes; you are leading a barren life. Take some time out and change, this is your ONLY LIFE.

Road to Hell is paved with good intentions

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:11:14 PDT

Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, bad things can happen. World is result-oriented; sometimes a good intentioned fool can do the same amount of harm as a bad-intentioned clever person. But does good-intentions exonerate a person from blame?

In some parts of India, there is a practice of euthanasia followed by people without even knowing it. When an old person is very sick; all the extended family and relatives gather around the bed, and everyone pours a spoon of ganga-jal in the dying man's mouth when he is not conscious. This then goes into his wind-pipe and blocks the flow of air and leads to death. The intentions were good; consequences disastrous.
Albert Einstein wrote a letter to USA explaining the research in atomic physics being done by Germany. It was a well-intentioned letter; but this prompted a similar research by US and consequent bombing of Japan in another "well-intentioned" attempt to end war.
In Mahabharata, Dhrithrasthra is the blind king and father of the two warring states. His failure to decide his own heir, ambivalence between what's right and what's helpful for his son, and turning a blind eye(pun) towards the disrobing of Draupadi eventually lead to the great battle of Mahabharata. This battle resulted in the killing of all his sons.

I tried to make these examples severe trying to portray the well-intentioned fools as guilty. History hasn't always done so. Why? Because human society has a culture of forgiving mistakes. That is why we are humans. We are often taught that its ok if we make mistakes because without making mistakes we will never learn.

But what if, we were taught its ok to make mistakes as long as our intentions are right. Will we ever learn. So, if we never learn from our mistakes and continue to condone ourselves by thinking ourselves as well-intentioned, road to hell will always be paved with good intentions.

Taking Risks

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:54:50 PDT

Note: For the next 21 days till July 3, I am going to blog about something or another every day. My blogs may not be large but it will be there every day.

Here is the quote which inspires this post:

To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.

What will happen if we never risk anything:

If Narayan Murthy did not risk his wife's jewellery and his personal possessions, there would have been no Infosys!
If James Wright did not risk his life in his attempts to fly, we would never have flown!
If an anonymous man in the past did not risk playing with fire, we might not have survived as a race!
If a new-born child does not risk opening her eyes, she would never have known the beauty of the world!
If you never risked standing up as a child; you would not have walked today!

So go out, take the risk and live the dream that you dreamt off.
What is the worst that will happen?
You might fail!
But you will never have the regret of not trying!

Every question has a hidden assumption

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:52:32 PST

These are the basic question types in English:

Q. What is X? : This assumes that there is something known as X. What if there is no such thing as X.
Q. When does X happen? : This assumes that X happens. What if X never happens.
Q. Where is X present? : This assumes that X will be present somewhere. What if X is not present at all.
Q. Why does X happen in the Y fashion? : This assumes that X happens in a Y Fashion. What if X or Y do not exist or if X does not happen in Y fashion at all.
Q. How does X does Y? : This assumes that X does Y. What if it doesn't do Y at all.
Q. Whom does X belong to? : This assumes that X belongs to somebody. What if its a free entity.

So whenever you are planning to answer a question, try finding out the hidden assumption first. If the assumption itself is wrong; then there is no point wasting time to find answer to a wrong question.

On a related note, always ask the right questions...

Meditation and Random Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:29:57 PST

We had a meditation session in the office and although I laughed at the whole thing. [Well, it is funny to see so many people humming at the same time like bees]. But one point made by the instructor really struck me. He said that everything is based on perception.

Even the facts are based on perception, for instance, I know that an atom is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. But have I seen them? No. It is based on some person who did some experiments to prove this. Well, then it can be argued, that what I believe in is not true too. Thats because an atom is made of many more particles like neutrino, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tauon, tendulkar, tauon neutrino, quarks, gauge bosons etc etc etc.

Did you even read that I put Sachin Tendulkar in that list! Thats because I don't care. For me, an atom is still made up of only 3 particles and I copied all these from Wikipedia . The point is that there are no hard facts about life and universe. Its kind of like the theory of relativity. Its all relative to what I see.

For instance, for me an atom is made of 3 particles only, but for a nuclear scientist it is made up of 100s of particles. For an old lady searching, Google, it is just a magical text box; but for a programmer at Google it is a complex program deployed over many machines in a complex distributed system to serve millions of queries per second. For a priest, God is real, he has devoted all his life to serving God; but for you and me, God is a distant entity who only figures up when we go to places of worship or when we are in difficulty. For some others, there is no God and only nature. For the rest, its all about fate. Whose truth is truth then? Is it yours or is it mine?

Well, maybe we are all in different reference planes, moving at different velocities, and that there are no absolutes just like Einstein said.

Thats called 'Hacking' :D

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:32:26 PST

Account Hacked!! (by a friend, so zyada ni machaya ;D ) I happen to guess password :D but nice to see 64 posts,16 followers on the Dashboard. So this is the workplace where ' "The God" actually works (NO, m not AP :p). Abhi the only thing i have to share is this pic. Have you ever seen him like this... i wonder when? :D Replies are welcomed...same for you Deej.. :p

The real story behind Chetan Bhagat's fight with 3 Idiots

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:09:26 PST

Being an engineering student, I have been interested in both the movie 3 Idiots and also the novel Five Point Somone. Infact the movie has been so successful that it has grossed over 100 crore rupees at its launch while the novel sold over 0.01 crore copies. That is the difference between films and novels. Films are so much bigger, get so much attention, and have such a wider audience.

Now there is a dispute between Chetan Bhagat and the makers of the movie 3 Idiots as to how much credit must have been attributed to the writer for the movie. The media is having a field-day with the dispute and it is really interesting to watch them play it out. (Yes, I watched it for whole 15 minutes or so, before I decided to come and check some real facts from the internet).

Here is the inflammatory, self righteous blog entry by Chetan Bhagat which is being quoted in the media. It was written by Bhagat in anger fueled by hundreds of fan mails; talks with sycophants(it means chaploos, yes I am reading dictionary these days :P ), whom he suddenly acquired after the launch of the movie. A novelist is not capable of keeping up with as much media attention as a film-star and does not know how to ignore it. An English novel is read only by a few lakhs of people who are so busy with their own lives, that they do not have time to go and appreciate the writer. While, a movie on the other hand, is watched by nearly everybody including students, un-employed, house-wives and all those people who have plenty of time at hand. Thus, the amount of feedback a film-star receives is humungous (and often irrelevant too) as compared to a novelist.

So this is what happens when too much attention goes to head. The movie makers have nothing to lose, they have got all the legal documents, their film is doing well and all this attention will only lead to more viewership for the film. Chetan, himself, does not need any more money. His books are doing well. The only thing he currently needs to do is damage control which he seems to be doing with this post. The damage done has been real, see here. Aamir refuses to give credit to Chetan while the producer and director of the movie have said publicly about not wanting to work with Chetan ever again. Their anger is just from their side, even if it is a mistake by Chetan done in ignorance.

What's the solution? Well I don't know, but it does prove that higher up you go, more you have to watch your words. They will be analysed, mis-interpreted(many-a-times deliberately) and always be quoted out of context. And I wish good luck to Chetan too.

How to Make a website

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:40:44 PST

It seems today that everything is being put on the web. Making a website is so easy that almost anybody can do it, it does not require you to be a great programmer or anything. It just requires you to have a bit of interest in computers and some designing ability. But what should be kept in mind, while you are off designing your own cool new shiny website....

Planning

The planning of the website needs to answer the following questions:
a) What is the goal or objective of the website. Is the website being made to sell a product, project a company, talk about oneself, provide information services or to share and collaborate between a peer group.

b) What are the target audience of the website. Every human being is different, if the target audience are teenagers and young people then aesthetics will be different than if the website is being designed for older people. A website for programmers will be totally different from a website for lawyers.

Design

There are many aspects to a good design. Some of which are:

a) User Friendliness: A website should be as user friendly as possible. A user should be able to access any information or do any transaction with the website with a minimum number of clicks. Now-a-days the number of clicks required to do an operation is a critical part of user study analysis. Minimizing the complexity of design and having the user to make less choices while still making him feel in control is the key to a more user friendly website.

b) User Myopia: Users tend to be myopic. They do not go through all the information written on a webpage, their field of vision is very limited. This is because through the internet, you are exposed to a large amount of content through the internet, and usually you are there on a website for a very specific purpose. Thus, a design should take this into account.

c) Information organization: The information should be organized in such a way that it satisfies the 80-20 rule. About only 20% of the website content will be seen by the 80% of the users. You need to optmize and find that 20% content to make the users happy. This will lead to good organization and better access for the user. The general rule of thumb for a good website is, that you want your website to serve highly relevant content and the user should be able to move on from the website as soon as he is done.

d) Less text and more graphics: It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Although this may not be applicable to all the pages, but a website designer should understand that a website is not a novel. A website is made on multimedia medium and should make full use of it. So, it should contain a healthy amount of information being given using hyperlinks, images and videos.

Implementation

There are really very few rules here since the amount of technologies available to do the same stuff is increasing exponentially. But the general rules are:

a) Keep the page load times minimal: You do not want to bloat the website. A good website should be using features like appcache and should have less content on their home pages so as to load faster.

b) Know the traffic on your website and plan accordingly: The worst thing you can have is have Google index your website and direct so much traffic to your homepage that it crashes. Plan the servers and the backends accordingly to handle all the anticipated and unanticipated load. You don't really want to be featured on a TechCrunch news article and be down on the same day. But with that said, we have seen outages even from experienced companies like Google and Microsoft in recent times.

Thats all you need... off you go to make your own new shiny website.

Life After College

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:08:27 PDT

It has been such a long time since I blogged that if you have been following this blog(highly unlikely), you will know that something strange has happened in this writer's life. Let me assure you, friends(/strangers/enemies), that although something(ok a LOT) has changed, but it has been good.

Ok let me give context to the stranger.. (friends/enemies already know this otherwise they won't qualify into that bucket)
Context:
I have graduated out of college(apparent from title, I know) and have stepped into the real corporate world. I have joined Google - The Best Technical company to work in(could not stop myself from doing a publicity plug) as a Software Engineer in Test.

Change:
It has been over 3 months for me working on a host of cool things and learning a lot. But apart from that learning, I have been learning some other things too and there have been a lot of changes in my life. Some of them are:

1. The stuff that I only dreamt of working on is now within hand's reach but I never get the time to work on it.
2. I am earning and it feels good to have your own money and to be independent and to be able to do your own stuff, but sometimes you feel like you can go back to your old self where somebody(read parents) always does everything for you.
3. I always used to wonder why people consider weekends sacred, for me everyday used to be a holiday. Now I have changed, weekends are sacred and Fridays seem to be more fun than Mondays to me.
4. I have found how ignorant I am in respect of coding and technology. I am doing a new assessment regarding my own skill set and knowledge of technology and coding. I am always trying to learn new things, but there are so many to learn, I never know which one to choose.
5. I thought that I will lose my friends, but I never had to lose them. I can contact them through chat or phone. Though, I really really miss the fun and carelessness of college(does not mean I am careful now).
6. Lastly and most importantly, I have started caring. Sometimes, I think and wonder how did this happen. But one reader of this blog knows exactly what has happened.

There are many miscellaneous changes like I am working on a mac(another post on it later); acted as a guide in an outing with parents(my first); not practicing guitar at all; making new friends; stepping out of my comfort zone; learning pool etc. etc. etc. But these things will come later, once I am a regular blog writer again.

I Am A Published Author Now

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:59:54 PDT

I went to the Technology For Education conference which was being hosted at Radha Regent Hotel in Electronic City in Bangalore. The preparation before the conference was "typical me". I was at my procrastinating best.

I had to present Foodforce paper at the conference. Till the night before, the ppt was about 50% complete. But that night, since I was not in a good mood and very tired(its an excuse, I know), I thought I will do it in the morning. My roommate woke me up at 5 AM, slept, and I started work. But, I again slept and woke up with him again at 7 AM.

So, now I started work at full speed now, all thoughts of creativity abandoned. But then the nature also conspired against me and at 8:00 AM or so, electricity gone. As I was working on my personal laptop (which has no battery and works only through electricity), I was in dire straits. Ppt still not completed, no hope for internet, and no hope of recovering ppt back. And I had to leave at 9 for the conference. I had not taken bath or had my breakfast yet(which was today my responsibility since I was not going to office). So, while I got down to these tasks, I asked Paras(my ever-helpful roommate) to ask the watchmen to switch on generators for me to recover my presentation. Our (ever so irritating) watchmen switched it on only for 2 minutes during which I barely recovered ppt. And then, fortunately, electricity came at 8:50, I completed rest of the slides, packed my bags, and was ready to go till 9:10. And I vowed "yet again", that I will never procrastinate my work ever again!

Foodforce2 Revolutionising Education

View more presentations from deepankgupta.

The hotel was wonderful, and the conference too, lots of great people present in it. The hi-fi atmosphere intimidated me and made me nervous. But, the talks were interesting and I forgot about preparing and started listening. Soon, it was my turn, they made me put on a mike, and I regained my nervousness. I skipped the title slide totally, was hesitant to start with, too fast to speak, infact I was blurting out things I guess. But people took interest, listened and I could feel the vibes of interested people. Then at the end, there were questions and questions, infact more questions than any of the previous talks. (Though you can argue, that it might be not because I was good but because people never understood what I said). People asked for the link to download the game, which obviously in my foolishness I had never put in the presentation. When I went back to my seat I was congratulated by people sitting next to me for giving a good talk. Chatted with some interested people during lunch. And it was a nice like any Hindi Film Happy Ending to a potentially disastrous start.

EDIT: Also I got hotel address from Paras after he went to office through SMS, since internet was also not working that day!

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 11:36:18 PDT

I have been a really great time here so haven't been blogging a lot.

Here are some tid-bits in photos...

Another Guitar Strumming .. this time away from home in Music Room at Google

Bowling Visit@Ambience

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:00:23 PDT

We finally had a first real team outing in what seems to be like an year! Its not that we haven’t met before, but all those meetings were ridden with Foodforce discussions, so they don’t count. Anyways, if you know something about the team, you will shake your heads in disbelief. For the uninitiated, the reason why we never had a team outing in the first place is because of the strange assortment of people in the team. The team contains a reallllly lazy bum as manager(thats me), ultra-sincere all-work-no-play coders like Vijit and over-worked Manu. This meant that even Mohit who had a social life(yes Mohit used to have social life before Foodforce) could do nothing. But well, things changed and a queer set of circumstances meant that we had our first team outing (without Manu sir but still!).

Ok first the circumstances. We won at technical fests in DCE for some events, got some cash prizes which obviously I did not go to collect. To cut a long story short, Mohit went in my place to collect the prize, we decided on a treat and Mohit persevered in making me come to Gurgaon! We invited Vijit who was really reluctant to come! His reasoning being that he has never gone for a social outing with friends before too! So, eventually out came the senior weapon, I ordered him to come(I know I am evil!). But, since we had no weapon against Manu sir, we could not convince him!

The outing was sooo much fun. Also, I got to know that well we(especially me) are not really cut out for bowling… perhaps we should stick to Foodforce only. Also, I got my eyes open, and finally realized what an 8% growth rate can do to a country. The place was looking so foreignish, it was just not like India.

Above are two videos of machana from the outing…..

Jaane Kyun hum kho gaye

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Sat, 30 May 2009 04:40:09 PDT

A very slow sad song composed and sung by me…

Foodforce2 Beta Release

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Sun, 10 May 2009 11:26:18 PDT

The Beta version of the FoodForce2 game has been released for the XO, Windows and Linux platforms. The game has been developed in Python and Pygame. It is fun to play and also serves as a learning activity for children aimed at helping them to learn strategies through independent interaction and collaboration for managing community resources efficiently, and solve issues of varied proportions. It can also be used as a tool by the teachers to teach children how to become better and responsible community managers.

The work would not have been possible had it not been for the dedicated efforts by Mohit(who has practically spearheaded the development), Vijit(who has been extremely hardworking) and Peeyush with inputs from Manu Sir from time-to-time.

Some of the innovative features that have been incorporated in the beta are:

The storyboard has been implemented in the game, which includes different scenarios, each of them is related to a particular key learning area or a social issue.
The game is playable over the mesh network on XO, the trading scenario has been implemented over the mesh network.
Drastic reduction in memory footprint of the game along with optimizations for efficient game-play.
A major UI Redesign of the game has been done to make things more intuitive for the child.

For more info about the game click here. The game can be downloaded from here.

We have seen close to around 550 downloads in the past 3 days. (Mostly because of excellent publicity and great review by SJ like this. Go, download the game and give it a try.

We recently organized a hands-on session with the students and teachers of Delhi Police Public School in Safdarjung Delhi, India. We have documented the test methodology and test results here. The storyboard used in the game has been documented here. Please provide feedback at the wiki or through comments and suggestions on this blog.

Decoding “huh”

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Tue, 05 May 2009 10:41:22 PDT

Disclaimer- This post is written from a guy's perspective so some of our female readers(on second thought do gals really visit this blog???) might not like it....

If you ask any guy to make a list of most frustrating phrases to hear, “huh” will come up in the list for sure. We don’t understand it and the word has so many varied meanings that even after an extensive research we have not been able to come up with a single best response against it. But our guide might help you survive.

So here it goes:

1. The “I don’t believe you” “huh!”: This huh is good, means you have surprised the other person with whatever you have said just now and you should feel good about it.

2. The “Sarcastic I don’t believe you” “Huh!”: This huh is said in a sarcastic way, when she does not believe what you are saying is true. It is usually difficult to differentiate between the “I don’t believe you” and the “Sarcastic I don’t believe you” huh. You should pay close attention for other verbal or visual cues to differentiate between the two.

3. The “Genuine I dint get you” “huh?”: Usually means you are very nervous and your voice is deserting you while you are standing in front of her making you incoherent. It also might mean that or are conversing in a place with lots of background noise.

4. The “I don’t Understand you” “huh??”: This huh usually is the first sign. Take heed. It should make you look back and stop your “geeky”, “sports”, “boast” or other such talk. On the positive outlook, this also means that she is genuinely interested in what you want to say and thus it is a great chance to get that point across but just don’t push for it.

5. The “Irritated” “huh!!”: This means that you are really starting to get on her nerves and usually requires you to make rapid changes in your attitude. It is usually used when she does not like your attitude towards something or someone. If you don’t seem to understand it, then the best strategy should be to change the topic.

6. The “I don’t care/indifferent” “huh!!”: This means that you have already lost her. She does not care for what you are saying. You did not pay close attention to the earlier stages and now you need to really do something desperate to get back the attention. Otherwise this conversation is already lost.

7. The “Getting Angry” “Huhhh” : This is the one of the most dangerous kind as she is going to get angry with you if you don’t take any correcting steps now. Warning bells should be sounded and you should rack through your brains to find all the things you said in the last 15 seconds. Because certainly some thing you said has been really unpleasant. Make amends, apologize and let go.

8. The “Already angry” “Huhhhhhh” : This means that she is already angry. Although an apology will not hurt, but you will need to mean it. This means that you need to understand why she is angry and if you have reached this stage, it usually means you have no clue about it. Try hard and take immediate action, otherwise the conversation has already turned into a disaster.

9. Crying Huh : Guys you never wanna be anywhere near this kind of huh… God save you, you have really hurt her, bad bad you!

If you are wondering why and whose idea was it to decode “huh”. Well it was Ankit’s and he has collected all the data. Why did he do it? Well, it gave him a chance to talk to girls for some reason :P. I just volunteered to compile the data into this useful, easy to understand(perhaps) guide.

Ankit: Guys, this is our humble attempt at unraveling the mystery if you feel we did a good job please encourage us so that we continue on this path to make your lives easier. Also, we would like to thank all the girls who answered my queries patiently and for answering my weird questions. Though there is a possibility that some girls might run after me for hitting me after reading this post(if they do read this blog) for wasting their time to collect data for this (stupid?) post. I haven’t mentioned the names of the girls whom i asked questions related to the expression huh. Though, if they feel like it, they can mention their names in the comments..

My First Small Guitar Composition

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:39:01 PDT

I bought a guitar, though all credits goes to Karan, had it not for him, I would never thought or ventured out of the safe confines of home to buy. Learning guitar is tough and painful(for fingers), but the results are amazing. The sound of guitar (well I am overly biased and highly ignorant) is better than any other musical instrument. I am addicted and been playing an hour or so daily. Lets just hope the fad of Guitar does not wear for me… like blogging did recently.

I have been at it for the past 15 days, learning from the internet. Learnt some chords and tried changing between them, applied it to some songs too. But, most satisfying thing, I also composed a small tune, uses only 3 chords A D and G, nothing very great…

This second one is an attempt to do light string picking using only A and D chords and switching real slow between them.

Holi-Day

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:41:27 PDT

It was the first sincerely played Holi for me. When I was a child, I loved wetting others with my small pichkari. In school, I used to run and hide and somehow always escape with minimum damages. This boring routine continued in college too.

But, this time it was different: I wanted to play Holi voluntarily. So me and Karlos, decided to start a new conversation thread on gmail devoted to calling and asking people of our gang to come to college, though Karlos himself did not come. What would you call it: double-crossing, back-stabbing or what. He has a lot of explaining to do…

I had some other works too(read project with ANG sir) and thus, I came early(read 10) and went straight to his room. While I was writing abstract(somehow it is the most important thing of a paper) with sir, time flew. Then I thought, well lets see, Is there any class going on today? So, I take leave of sir, at 11:30, to go straight to class. I had not even entered the class, that wicked comes from behind and start throwing balloons at me. He threw 2 and the third burst open since we were both trying to get it. Then there were other things like Pushy bursting my own balloon into me with a big blow of his hand on my stomach. I was out of breath for whole 2 minutes. Then there was Himanshu bursting an egg on my head(yuck! the only thing I was upset about, since I am a veggie), Ganja starting with pakke colors on me. Then I was in, and Holi started.

The next 2 hours were spent plotting, running after new-comers, using different types of colors on people. Worse was the fate of new-comers, nearly all of us came to get them.

Some interesting instances :

1. Wicked : We are armed with AK-47s(we had pakke colors) while they (Varun and Party) are still playing with handguns(gulal). Lets get them.

2. Mukki makes an entry in Nescafe campus (all black) without his spectacles looking an exact twin of AP.

3. Anubhav comes with a high-tech sprayer for colors which threw some blue soap sortta meterial which was eventually used in making beards of people.

4. Pushy showing off his six-packs. Pushy lifting me up on his shoulders… I hadn’t realised how tall he is, till now. I think it will be nice to be him, getting a helicopter view of everything.

5. Me coming back after washing some color and Oye coming from behind to put more on my recently cleaned face. I should have guessed his intentions while he was musing: “Tu toh jaldi saaf ho gaya”.

6. Assim was taking a photo with his digicam which has multiple face recognition algo in it and while the cam detected all other faces, it did not detect Santy’s face. Well I must say it was not camera’s fault, since his face was all black. But Assim in any case found a bug in the software.

Then after all this, we go to play cricket. And I have a realisation. I am the worst cricket player ever in the history of NSIT. I knew I am bad, but did not know that I am the worst. I made only 3 runs in 3 innings while running out my partner twice and dropping 3 catches in 3 matches. It was miserable(for me only though), the matches were otherwise good and close with lots of haggling over rules in between.

So at the end, we were all tired, could not remove the colors from our faces even after soaping them for long. So we trudged back to home. And, in the bus, getting some of the strangest looks. There was this one decent-looking guy, who kept staring and staring. He was sitting some 2-3 rows back, otherwise, maybe I would have confronted him with: “Have you never played holi, well I hadn’t too, until today that is”.

I come back home, and my mom is pleasantly surprised. She says, “I always thought you were afraid of colors.” Here are some pictures of this wonderful day below

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Qualities One Should Have

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:41:33 PDT

Philosophical Post

I have always pondered a lot about what is the most important quality a person should have. Often I used to zero in on intelligence, hard-work, seriousness/discipline, truthfulness and honesty in the past. These are the qualities, that our books and our elders tell us to imbibe. But I don’t think that one should strive for only these things. They are important too, but I don’t think that these are primary. These are all secondary things.

There is another set of qualities that are even more important. Those are courage, respect and curiosity.

The most important thing a person should have is courage. One should be courageous in face of adversity, meet challenges head on, never buckle under pressure and should be able to draft into uncharted territories with courage. Whenever, you are going through tough times, people ask you to “Be Brave”. Follow it always in life.

And to tell you a secret, I am not at all brave.

The next important thing is Respect. One should have respect for oneself and others. Never be disrespectful to anyone, including yourself. This includes under-estimating yourself/others. Mocking your/other person’s intelligence or honour.

I sometimes fail on this account too, but I try not to.

Lastly, one should never lose the curiosity in one’s life. It leads to many unexpected discoveries and joys around you.

My curiosity has dampened over the years.

I will try to imbibe these three qualities. Tell me your views on this(if you manage to read till here and did not already leave the page :) )

Creating Money Out of Nothing!

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:43:17 PST

DISCLAIMER: I am not a student in economics, neither do I profess to know anything about credit, debit, contracts, foreclosure, currency rates, stocks, bonds etc. This blog post only documents the stuff I have learnt from some videos and it might be instructional to ignorants like me.

Let me start with the question: What is Money?

Well in the old days of the barter system, anything you had which was in demand by other people constituted money eg. if you had wheat, it represented money. Then in the times of kings and queens, gold represented money. Why? Because all knew how hard it is to mine gold and thus it was valuable.

What is money today?

It is paper. I will tell you a story before illustrating how stupid this concept of money is.

One of my early childhood memory is: One day while I was doing shopping with my mama, I saw, that while the doodhwala(milkman) gave huge amount of milk(it was hard to carry, I tried!) and lots of notes and lot of coins, my mama gave him just one single note. I remarked to everybody after coming home, that our doodhwala is stupid. And they laughed and explained to me the concept of money. They explained that the same amount of paper can represent different values of money. Now when that notion was disturbing and counter-intuitive to even a child, why is it not disturbing to all of us. (It was disturbing to me because I still did not know how to print numbers on paper)

A person who claims himself to be authority can start cutting trees, making paper, put random values on it and then distribute it to people in return for some of their goods. Or if they have nothing to give in return, this benevolent person can give them this paper for free! Only if they promise to return it back to him some time later, but with interest i.e. more paper. Its only fair they say, because you got the money for free! Though they forget, that there is only one person making money the whole time. So if I borrow money from him and keep it safe, I will need to steal someone else money to pay back the interest and the original amount. If I fail, I will need to give my lands to the benevolent person and work for him for the rest of my life.

One might argue that cutting trees and making paper is hard work too. Well, that is true, but since that person can put any ridiculously high value on the paper, he can cheat you into giving more goods to him. Remember the story. And moreover, in today’s digital world, you don’t even need paper, since today almost 97% of the total money resides in computers! So, all in all, with the invention of computers, this seemingly benevolent person who distributes money to all the needy people just needs to type it all in his computers. Hard work indeed!

Now, you might want to know, who is this lucky person. A person who creates money by typing. Well that lucky person is your friendly neighbourhood international bank. They distribute money to the governments, large corporations and in turn people frequently for free! And when those people are not able to give back the original sum along with some more(remember interest), since they were not able to steal enough, bank takes away their lands and turn them into slaves(means they are bankrupt or more appropriately robbed by banks). They call this: “The Fractional Reserve Banking System”.

To summarize, I will leave you with this staggering ironic thought:

If all the people on this planet paid off every single dollar they owe to the banks, there would be no money left in circulation on this planet.

Relearning Coding

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:36:37 PST

First of all, I should admit, I have been spoiled! I have been spoiled by the IDE features of Visual Studio in C#. And now these days, I am getting to rectify my spoilt habits of coding. I am having to code in C++ these days. Intellisense is not even 10% as good in C++ as it is in C#. This post documents some of the things I have re-learnt over the past few weeks.

1. Write every line of code only after understanding fully the implications of what you are doing. There is no extra intelligent IDE working behind the scenes to redden the areas where you have slipped up. And this becomes all the more important if you have to recompile because of a semicolon or a incorrectly typed variable or a missing header file.

2. Never assume anything after seeing the name of the function. Do not use any function unless you have gone through its code and seen how it is implemented and how it is working. This is also for learning purposes. Usually you learn a lot after seeing the best practices.

3. Uncover your hidden assumptions. Train your mind not to make any assumption what-so-ever. An ancillary point is that you should check for errors after every single line of code. The checking errors part is so hard to do.

4. Always follow the principles of information hiding. Make only as much visible as is important. For instance, if you have a loop like this :

int i;

for(i = 0; i < 100; i++) { }

then this will be much better:

for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { }

Since in this i is only visible to the loop. You should follow this principle not only at the loop level, but also at the bigger levels like classes, header files, dlls and basically at every place you are coding.

5. And before I forget, always deallocate the memory you allocate. This becomes really hard and easy to forget if you allocate memory in one function and use it in another. Also, never try to work with null pointers.

This post was meant more for self-documentation and might include a second part as I get to know more and more stuff about coding.

Windows 7 Rocks!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Deepank Gupta) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:41:42 PST

Now, that I have made it clear from the title of the post itself, that I am a big supporter of Windows 7 let me follow up this post with my own experiences with Windows 7. You can yourself download Windows 7 beta version here and test it out.

The screenshot shows Windows 7 installed with AERO on my laptop. Now let me give some background of my laptop: it is a dual core machine with 1 Gig of RAM and had Windows Vista installed previously on it. It used to be painstakingly slow.

After doing a clean install of Windows 7, I could see a tremendous increase in speed. You might say that it is a clean version, which has no Visual Studios, thousands of media players and chat clients, Office and other crap in it. Yes, I agree, but still it is faster than a clean install of Windows Vista. Might be even faster than XP, though I can’t guarantee that!

So, the first thing I noticed was the speed and responsiveness and not the UI Improvements like better explorer, calculator, word pad, paint, libraries, taskbar, action center, notifications, UAC, icons, control panel etc etc etc. I came to notice all these improvements later on in due course.

Now after the install, it did not have the correct drivers for Video Graphics card of ATI Radeon, so my screen resolution was less. But still it did a decent job of detecting my Wifi, bluetooth, audio drivers. But it did not give me Aero and other decent UI Features. So, I got down to the job(which I did horribly): I installed all the drivers in XP compatibility mode and my machine complained. It now had good screen resolution, but had no audio, still no AERO, and was giving me the Blue screen of Death every time I shut down the machine. Then I uninstalled all the drivers and my machine came in 640 * 480 resolution with 256 colors. I could do nothing much with it. So, I decided to connect the machine to the internet. And whoa! it detects all the correct drivers and installs them out of the box. And it was fast, took me less than 5 minutes to get it all working once it was connected to Internet. Moral of the story: Don’t be a smart-ass, just connect your machine to the internet, and let it do the job.

The software for this windows was made with one thing in mind: it should be stable, fast and “it should just work”. This is a better version of Windows Vista, with not much changes in the kernel. Infact, if you see the details, it has nearly the same number of services and processes as Windows Vista. The focus has been on making the computing experience better.

And I think, they have succeeded. World has never seen a more stable beta in the history of Software Releases. I think Windows 7 will be released before August since this beta expires on 1st August 2009. So, be ready for a release of Windows 7 before that.

Although, I am all praise for Windows 7, I still should say that I have managed to crash it five times now (but that was when I did not have the correct drivers). This is one Windows which you won’t be disappointed by…

I have attached some screenshots to motivate you to try the beta :

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