Gokulnk

Keeping track of your cryptocurrency Trades

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 25 Dec 2017 18:06:00 +0000

Orignial Article : https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@gokulnk/best-cryptocurrency-portfolio-manager

Missing the chance to be an early adopter of Bitcoin and Blockchain

I first heard about Bitcoin back in 2011 and spent some time reading about it. I found it interesting but never considered investing in it. Again in 2013 I had a discussion with a friend about doing something related to Cryptocurrencies. We did some preliminary research and then dropped the idea as the regulations were not clear in India about cryptocurrencies. I did think of investing some amount in Bitcoin but was not very comfortable with all the money being tied to a Private Key which I could end up misplacing somewhere. I had not heard of any Bitcoin exchanges back then and so I let go off my chance to get into Bitcoin Bandwagon when the price of Bitcoin was around 100 USD. I finally invested in Bitcoin in June 2017.

The Adhoc process and the trouble tracking

One of the first learnings you have when entering cryptocurrency markets is that Bitcoin is just the tip of the iceberg there are many alt-coins. You do some research and realise there are different Exchanges and you will need to have accounts in these different exchanges to trade different alt coins. So you create accounts in different exchanges only to realise that you cannot transfer your Bitcoin/Ether to ICOs for you to get new coins that are not yet traded on any exchanges. So in a short span of time you end up with accounts in 10+exchanges, an offline wallet for Bitcoin and an offline wallet for Ether. And if you prefer to keep your alt-coins in offline wallets then you will have one many more offline wallets.

Hitting the road block and the search for perfect cryptocurrency portfolio manager

Very soon you will realise that keeping track of all your cryptocurrency investments is not an easy job and it cannot be done by making entries in your spreadsheet. I hit a similar roadblock around 2 months ago. I did some google searches and read up on various cryptocurrency portfolios. After some digging up I came across Cointracking. I spent some time digging around their portfolio web app and I was convinced that this portfolio should be sufficient for the next two years. Since there was a limit of 200 trades on the free account I went ahead and bought the one year membership. I have found a couple of features that I use frequently and helps me sleep better that I have a handle on all my cryptocurrency investments.

If you have asked any of these questions to yourself or in any forums in the last couple of months then read further

What is the best bitcoin tracker or
Which cryptocurrency portfolio tracker tracks all my purchases, transfers and trades
Which bitcoin portfolio tracker tracks all my trades automatically
Which bitcoin transaction tracker also tracks all altcoin trades and balances
Which is the cryptocurrency trading/tracking software
How can I track the fees I pay across exchanges

Explainer Video

If you are too lazy to read further watch the video to get a gist of what I am saying.

If you watched the video and you are already convinced that you should start using the portfolio tracker use this referral link Cointracking to get a 10% discount. If you use Bitcoin to buy you will get an additional 5% discount. That is another thing I liked about Cointracking. Everybody who is building businesses using cryptocurrencies or around cryptocurrencies should follow this approach to promote their adoption.

Entering/Tracking your trades

The first step to track your portfolio is to make sure that all the purchases, withdrawals and trades are exported from any exchange/wallet you use are imported into Cointracking App. This can be done in three ways Enter manually, Import from Exchanges or automatically via the API if your exchange supports it. I had to use a combination of all these three to keep my portfolio upto date.

Manual
1. Entry for my balances from Steemit
Imports from exchanges
1. CEX
2. Xcoins
3. Bitshares
Automatic Imports through API
1. Poloni Exchange (Not using any more and wouldn't share the link)
2. Bittrex
3. Bitfinex
4. Binance
5. Liqui
Wallet Imports
1. Sync from my Ether Wallet Address (Using this primarily for ICOs)
2. I have ordered Ledger Nano and will need to check how to sync with it once it arrives.

Manual Entries

Make sure to enter all the relevant details. Remember to enter all the optional data as well as it can save you when you are trying to delete the trades or edit them. Trade Group helps your group one kind of trades and give details comments to remember later why you had to do a manual entry. Follow this diligently and you will thank me later.

Exchange Imports

In my case CEX didn't have an API and hence I had to go with exchange import option. Cointracking does a cool job of letting you know what kind of transactions are supported by the export provided by the exchanges. Keep an eye on this. Some exchanges doesn't provide you details about deposits and withdrawals. This can have an effect on your summaries. You might need to keep track of those and create manual entries for those to keep your Dashboard upto date.

You need not worry about the duplicate imports as each trade has a unique tradeId and based on it Coin tracking will import only the new trades.

Automated API Imports

Cointracking gives you the details of the supported actions in the API import.

Be careful if you are using the API for syncing your trades. I would suggest enabling the APIs in the exchanges only after enabling the Two Factor Authentication(2FA) and make sure that you only enable the read access in the API. When I was trying to enable the API for Binance I realised that they have all or none access. So your API will either have both Read and Trade access or none. When I saw the API integration screen of Binance I could see the bold read warning message from Cointracking saying that they do not save the API secret key as it has trading access as well. This was good sign for me and my confidence in Cointracking increased after this incident. It is still foolish that Binance doesn't have access restrictions on their API.

Wallet Imports

I have never been comfortable with Offline wallets as I fear that I will miss my private keys :P I have always held back on creating one as there is no way to regain the stash if you loose your private keys. But I had to create one for ether as I wanted to participate in a couple of ICOs.

As you can see from the pic Cointracking has support for Electrum and Exodus imports. I hope going forward they will add support for more wallets.

It also has support for monitoring your Bitcoin, Altcoin and Eth addresses meaning it can track the transfers from wallets and it also has a nifty feature of sending out a notification to you when a transaction happens from your wallet. I think that is very handy.

The Dashboard

Once you have all the integrations set up and imports done you should have dashboard which gives you a overall idea of your portfolio and current holdings.

You can also customize your dashboard and choose three different templates for the dashboards as shown in the image. I think we need to have a few more options and we should ideally be able to select each and every widget we want in our dashboard and be able to save it as a new template. But however the current dashboards is good enough and I don't want to complain :)

Timeline is one that caught my attention. It gives you a nice grahical view of important milestones in your journey and gives you a feeling of dejavu.

Reports

There are various reports provided by Cointracking. I majorly use the following reports.

Trade List

Use this report to make sure that all your trades are present. Whenever I do a trade I check the next day to make sure that it is there. I am more of a HODLer and hence it is not a problem.

Balance by Exchanges

This gives you a quick idea of how your stash is distributed across the exchanges. When something is amiss or transactions seem to be missing, this view can give you a quick idea about which trades are missing.

Fees

This is something that most people miss out. If you are an active trader keep an eye on this as this number can raise quickly and you wouldn't even notice. Most of the people do the mistake of not considering this when doing their profit/loss calculations. Read this post to know the Irony of trading on Centralised Exchanges

Realised Gains

If you have bought a stash of a particular coin at low price and have been selling them at every high, it becomes very difficult for you to identify what are you profits over the time. Also at times you will feel like knowing the answer to the question "If I sell the remaining part of my stash will I make a profit, loss or break even". If you have been in that situation before then the Realised and Unrealised Gains report can give you very good insights.

Similarly if you have bought at different prices to average out then this report can give you the average purchase price of a coin.

Taxes

Yes you will need to pay your taxes on Cryptocurrencies gains. I am not sure if many are thinking about this right now but this can be a Herculean task. Looks like Cointracking has you covered here as well. With ability to configure various parameters for your tax reports I think this can come handy.

If you are planning to use this portfolio manager use this referral link Cointracking to get a 10% discount and don't miss out on the additional 5% discount if you use Bitcoin for payments.

If you have come across any other portfolio manager do let me know so that I can take a dig at it.

DrupalCamp : Where passions meet

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 07:33:00 +0000

The Drupal Start :

I started my career with Mindtree as Programmer Analyst(Java) in Jan 2009 and started exploring Drupal right around the same time for a personal projects I was working on. My cousin and I were comparing Joomla and Drupal. Based on some basic research I decided to spend more time on Drupal. It's been five years since then. I have my share fair of complaints about Drupal but I have never regretted the shift from Java to Drupal.

Background :

One of the reasons I made a switch to Drupal was because at any point in my life I could start a venture of my own with technology backing from Drupal. In fact that became a reality very soon after moving to Drupal. I started a custom merchandise venture that specializes in kannada T-shirts. http://aziteez.com/ as you must have already guessed was built on Drupal and I was able to start what I call as a zero investment venture. We have been around for 3 years now and have a loyal customer base of around 20,0000.

The Day of DrupalCamp :

Fast Forward to Feb7-Feb8, Drupal Camp Mumbai. (For those of you who don't know, Drupal Camps are a good platform to meet like minded people who work on Drupal and are enabling various businesses, startup and NGOs.) Chakri and I facilitated a workshop on first day about Headless Drupal and the next day was all for hackathons and code-sprints.

The Surprise :

Imagine my surprise when I spotted a guy(Mr X) who was wearing a hoodie that was made by Aziteez. I walked up to him and introduced myself as the co-founder of Aziteez and was curious to hear out his story. The particular hoodie that he was wearing had an interesting story in itself. Pawan Kumar is a well known name today in Kannada Film Industry and we had had partnered with him for his next venture C10H14N2 . The Hoodie that our Mr.X was wearing was done for the promotion of the same movie.

The story of Mr.X :

Mr.X went on to say that he was from IIT Bombay and he was interested in Drupal. I was glad to know that many of his friends(kannadigas) had purchased Tshirts online from Aziteez and they were happy with the quality and designs of kannada T-shirts we have come up with. He went on to tell me that they had all liked the movie Lucia and wanted to do their bit to promote Pawan Kumar's next venture and hence they had purchased the Hoodies from Aziteez.

Search for Mr.X :

It was a memorable experience for me as it was a coming together of all the things that I love or care about. Just to make sure that I can recount on this experience in future I made sure that I had a snap with him. I am bad with names and I was sure that I couldn't count on my memory. As it goes, I forgot his name and am trying to locate him :) Please tag him or leave a comment if you our Mr.X

India : A map of Sex Ratios Districtwise

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 17:28:00 +0000

I have not spent much time on javascript and have always avoided any opportunity to work with javascript related frameworks. Recently after many postponements I started working on D3.js and here is the output of what I could achieve over a weekend.

If you want to use the svg along with state and district codes visit my github repo

A few of the observations that I could made from the graph are

Coastal regions have a better sex ratio.
South India does better when compared to North India.
I was assuming that Karnataka would have a better ratio than that of Bangalore. But I was surprised to find that AP does better than Karnataka.
In-fact a viz done by a friend of mine addresses precisely that. As per the viz there is a lot of improvement over the last decade which kind of justifies my surprise ;)

Read further for credits and my learning resources.
Note that this is a very crude implementation. I wanted to get the working map out there and then work on improving features and code quality.

DashingD3JS helped me get started and thinking with joins helped me understand joins better.
I used the color palettes form Color Brewer. It has a nice set of palettes and comes shipped with D3. A nice graphical view of the same is a smart implementation done using D3.js and ColorBrewer again.
I used some sample codes from here.
I used the svg map from wikimedia
It used the names and didn't use the district codes assigned by the Census 2011. There was no easy way of mapping these details.
I used the official document from census and used this temporarily identify the missing codes and names.
Most of the changes were because of the spelling mistake or abbreviations. I had to fix these manually.
I ignored that fact that there can be different districts with same name in different states. This caused a little headache and tookup more than 3-4 hours to sort it out.
I have shared the update svg map along with state and district codes on github

Gita Audio files for download

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Download Audio Files of Gita(Bhagavadgita) Chanting in Sanskrit.

Recently my mom wanted the sankrit chanting of Gita slokas on her phone. I googled and was surprised that I had to spend more than half an hour to search and download the files. The closest was this(http://www.astrojyoti.com/bhagavadgitamp3.htm) but the links were all broken. I had to manually copy the urls to browser and download. If you are searching for the download of Gita files you are in luck. Just click on the download links in below table.

If you are a developer and want to know what I did read on.

Introductory Dhyana Slokas	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita00-intro.mp3	Download
Chapter 1 – The Despondency of Arjuna	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita01.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 2 – Sankhya Yoga	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita02.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 3 – The Yoga of Action	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita03.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 4 – The Yoga of Wisdom	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita04.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 5 – The Yoga of Renunciation of Action	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita05.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 6 – The Yoga of Meditation	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita06.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 7 – The Yoga of Wisdom & Realisation	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita07.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 8 – The Yoga of the Imperishable Brahman	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita08.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 9 – The Yoga of the Kingly Science & Secret	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita09.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 10 – The Yoga of the Divine Glories	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita10.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 11 – The Yoga of the Vision of Cosmic Form	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita11.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 12 – The Yoga of Devotion	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita12.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 13 – The Yoga of Distinction	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita13.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 14 – The Yoga of the Division of Tri-Gunas	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita14.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 15 – The Yoga of the Supreme Spirit	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita15.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 16 – The Yoga of the Divine & the Demon	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita16.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 17 – The Yoga of the Threefold Faith	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita17.mp3	Download MP3
Chapter 18 – The Yoga of Liberation by Renunciation	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita18.mp3	Download MP3
Appendix	http://media.astrojyoti.com/stotras/BhagavdGeeta/Bhagavad-gita-app.mp3	Download MP3

Techies read on. Well I was not in mood to spend time on automation/macros. So today I took out some time to automate those and learnt a few things in the process :P

It is difficult to copy the columns from a HTML table. Download https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/table-capture/iebpjdmgckacbodjpijphcplhebcmeop?hl=en . This extension will help you highlight(lowlight in fact :P) and copy the table contents to a google doc.
In google doc you can select a column. I selected the column that contains the download url (just text and not the download link)
By the way when you have a column that is created using formula but you want to convert that to just plain values. Do a copy of the column and then do a past special with 'paste only values' option.
You can use =LEFT(B2, FIND("mp3", B2)+2) to extract the text ending with first occurance of mp3
To force download a file on the client side you can use the download attribute in the anchor tag. Check out my links Download MP3 to know more :)

BTW if you are thinking why am I mixing up stuff, I recently realised that the reason most people don't share their learnings is that they try to make it very organized and in the process loose their motivation. So I am planning to share my knowledge more in an adhoc manner which reduces the burden on me.

Hacking into Karnataka Election Results Website

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:15:00 +0000

"Statistics hide more than what they reveal", I could related to the meaning of this quote after coming across a post election results number crunching done by an analyst.

It all started with this analysis of facebook. This analysis goes on to say that if BJP and KJP had stayed together, their combined votes would have been greater than that of the Congress in 93 constituencies. What this analyst omits is whether BJP+KJP would have won in all these 93 seats? Definitely not, because there might be other parties who could have garnered more votes that BJP+KJP or Congress. Though the analyst doesn't mention that BJP would have won in 93 seats, it kind of leads the end user to believe so. I am not blaming the analyst here, but sharing my opinion of what it made me think.

So out of curiosity I just wanted to see in how many places BJP+KJP votes would have been greater than the winning votes. So I set out find out the data of the Karnataka Election results. I was not able to find any open data that was in a consumable format for a developer[Kindly let me know if there is one. I thought it was better to hack into their site than file for an RTI]. All I had was this http://eciresults.nic.in/ConstituencywiseS10171.htm . An ill designed website(Can you still imagine that they use tables within tables :P) that would let me check the results only by the constituencies and not any other parameter. So if I need to get the complete data I need to visit 223 such pages that gives me results for their respective constituencies. So I looked at the URL naming patterns and it turned out that there was a co-relation between the results url and the constituency code. So I took a list of all the constituency codes from the drop-down on the page, used some notepad++ macros to clean up the HTML mess and make it a php array. Once I had the array of constituency codes I wrote a simple script to scrape the 223 urls and get the relevant data. Then I imported this data into my database using a CSV file. I wrote a few views handlers to expose the database table to views on my drupal site. Created three views to display the data.

http://diasporaindica.com/karnataka-election-results

http://diasporaindica.com/karnataka-election-results/cities

http://diasporaindica.com/karnataka-election-results/parties

I also made the output available in a json format so that other developers can use the data to form their own visualizations.

The end points are

Votes recieved : http://diasporaindica.com/rest/ker.json
Constituencies : http://diasporaindica.com/rest/parties.json
Cities : http://diasporaindica.com/rest/cities.json

Using these data I was able to validate the following two theories.

BJP + KJP : BJP along with KJP could have won only in 75 constituencies, thought there combined votes would have been more than Congress in 93 locations. http://diasporaindica.com/karnic_bjp_kjp
Marginal Votes : Since the Indian electoral system follows winner takes it all approach, marginal votes play an important role deciding the outcome. Infact it is because of these marginal votes that the corrupt politicians are ready to pay huge premiums of money and liquour for every single vote. And Independent parties though they may not have a huge share of votes, they can play the spoil sport by ruining some big shots chances. So I did a simple calculation to see in how many places the sum of all votes received by all the independents was greater than the difference between the top two candidates. Surprisingly it turns out that they could have played a crucial role in 47 constituencies.
That made me curious about the Independent parties. So I dug in a little more deep using the screens I had created. And I found out that there are 1217 Independent candidates who participated in these elections. http://diasporaindica.com/karnataka-election-results?candidate_name=&citi_name=&party_name=Independent&items_per_page=All&offset=0&order=votes_recieved&sort=asc with the least number of votes being 52 votes :P

The following are some of the visulization I built using this data.

Learn About Tableau

In the first visualization I have ordered Congress first, BJP + KJP next. I have kept their colours similar so that you get a sense of how they could have performed togehter and then followed by JDU and independents.

With this basic Proof of Concept of how the data can be made publicly accessible using the APIs and how the data can be used to make various analysis and visulizations of the results I hope the Gov will consider making the next election results open data.

* I was able to complete all of these in a span of 3 days. Special thanks to www.devthon.org which give me the ideal ambiance to work on this project. Thanks to my company www.azrisolutions.com for sponsoring the devthon event and supporting me.

An awesome place to work from

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 06:43:00 +0000

After having been used to working from home for almost 9 months, it was really tough to get my ass up and going to work from a new office. But the excitement of setting up a new office and being responsible for it was giving me quite a high. However it turned out that the excitement of setting up a new office was short lived. The reason was that we were considering trying out a new idea namely co-working. For those of you who don't know what co-working is head to http://blog.coworking.com/ get a hang of it. If you want to know in short, read on. Co-working is relatively new idea(6 years old). It is popular in US, Europe and countries like Japan. But in India the fever has just started. There are enough number of good reasons to try Co working. Two reasons why I personally prefer Co-working to working remotely are you won't feel lonely and helps the offices go green.

Now that we had decided to go for co-working, we had to find a suitable place. We listed down the criteria for the selection of the co-working space.

It should be close to me and Chakri. If not at-least the ride should be a one without much traffic hassles.
The ambiance of the space has to good. It should be a creative space rather than the normal office cubicles.
It should have good Wifi connectivity.
It should be a place where fellow developers would like to hang out in the evenings with a beer.
We should be able to host events where we can evangelize Drupal.

Though we were not able to find a space with all these qualifications, we zeroed in on a space which we felt satisfied most of the above mentioned points. It is located in Koramangala First block. (Yes that is 13 km from my home :( ) But after having a look at this space I could not say no. Since this is a co-working space, it hosts few other companies like http://www.questalliance.net/ , http://blindboys.org/ and few interns from http://www.frogdesign.com/ I am yet to familiarize with the folks here and currently I am waiting for Chakri to come here so that we can go for lunch. There are quite a few eat-outs here as well.

If you are wondering how our new Bangalore office is check out the images below. This images doesn't cover the whole office, they just cover the exteriors and the space we work from. You should check out the whole office some time. Its like a castle :)

Side view

Front view

The main gate

Greenery and sitting space inside

A room

The yellow structure is the space we work from

The view from my workspace

@azrians : I know I know. If you have any plans of shifting to Bangalore office, I am open to accepting gifts from you(may be an iPad :P) so that I can put across your case to Mohan and Venky ;) By the way don't let him know that I told you this.

Oh here is the address : 108, 6th Cross, 2nd Main Road, Koramangala 1st Block Bengaluru, Karnataka 560034

Open source has more reasons to thank the cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:32:00 +0000

Cloud computing has always been seen as a game-changer. If not today at-least a few years down the line Cloud is definitely gonna change the way we function. A developer, an entrepreneur, a end user and a common man will all have their own version of how the CLOUD changed their lives. But however, as the title suggests, my motivation for writing this article is completely different.

I was at the OSI days 2011 on behalf of Azri solutions, which was held at Nimhans convention center Bangalore. There were a good number of informative sessions and a few workshops which did help many attendees to get a hands on about the the technology being discussed. There we companies : big and small, developers : novice and pros, marketing teams : strategic and in your face types, students : studious and get-swags, opinions : pro and anti. But all in all, there was a lot of activity happening(business cards being exchanged ;) ) and the awareness about Open Source was raising. Everybody there had a reason and by the end it looked like most of them were happy with the outcome of the event.

But there was one thing that I could constantly observe behind all this hungama. The marriage of proprietary and open-source software(or their makers) and cloud was the match-maker. Be it the key-note by Gianugo Rabellino, Microsoft or the session "Using Open Source to commoditize your technology" by Gil Yehuda, Yahoo message was clear.

Remember Gandhi's lines? First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. If we modify this quote for the current scenario it would be First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they accept you as in integral part and the world wins.

They = Proprietary and you = Open-source

First they ignore you : They did this for too long. They behaved as if open-source didn't exist. Reason? Open-source didn't eat into their pie yet, at that time.

then they laugh at you : Yes that is exactly what they did. They called it ridiculous. They asked "Why would somebody write code for free".

then they fight you : Yes they did fight too. But not directly. They said the features sets of open-source are not exhaustive. They questioned the credibility. They cautioned about business continuity taking a hit. "Lack of support has a ripple effect across an Open Source CMS project", a Sitecore white paper pointed out (You should check out the interesting debate between site-core and Dries here).

then they accept you as in integral part : Though I consider most of the points they point out(in the last paragraph) as not true concerns, that last one is something which I feel the open-source should handle well. And that is exactly the void that proprietary software based companies like microsoft, yahoo can fill. Support is something which is number intensive and big guys can do better. Other areas which have space for collaboration are 3rd party integrations, standard compliance and security measures. These are the ways in which the open-source can benefit from biggies like microsoft and yahoo. What about the reverse direction? The inertia of bigger companies generally prevent them from innovating quickly and the need for standard compliances prevent them from embracing the newer technologies. This is where open-source can be of great help to them.

Though the above mentioned factors have been pushing for the union of proprietary and open-source for quite a few years now, the pace has picked up only recently. The reason? You guessed it right, its cloud computing. Having realized the true business potential of cloud, all the companies are pushing the concept of cloud. (Did I tell you that microsoft was giving away blue tooth handsets for registering to Azure? at #osidays ?) Now the question still remianing. How does cloud computing motivate the union? The answer yet again is a simple one. The very concept of cloud has led people to imagine that most of the technologies are supported in the the cloud services that they choose. If the support for proprietary softwares are not provided, the cloud computing providers have a valid reason(the licencing fee), but they have no valid reason for not supporting a open-source CMS, CRM or any software for matter as they come free. And hence naturally the users expect the support for all the major open-source software for free and for sure ;) To provide support for these softwares they need at-least a small team who are well versed with these technologies as then need to provide at-least the basic support once they are providing it in their cloud stack. And the good thing is that it doesn't stop with the small team :)

Open source has more reasons to thank the cloud.

Drupal CXO Panel Meet : Managing a Drupal consulting firm

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:52:00 +0000

Dries lighting the lamp. Image : Vasudeesha

After an early morning flight from Bangalore to Delhi, and a ride in the Delhi Airport Metro Express (DAME) and the Delhi local metro, I was late for Drupal Camp Delhi. Unfortunately I missed the Dries' keynote speech. But however the Panel discussion was still in progress and the volunteers ushered me to the Panel Discussion Hall. Being a speaker at the camp did help after all.

The room boasted off CXO's of most popular small and medium scale Drupal houses from India. [For those of you those who don't know what CXO is, basically X can be replaced by a meaningful letter. So CTO, CEO, CFO, CLOs ... all fall under CXO]

These were the following points that caught my attention during the panel discussion.

Lack of Drupal Talent : This was one issue that every CXO in the room agreed to. Being a Drupal developer myself, I could not agree more. The number of calls I keep getting regarding the new opportunities to shift is just a testimony.

The response from Dries & Ron was that even Acquia faces the problem, and their solution was to start the drupal training by themselves and then create a in-house talent pool. The CXOs too felt that this is the only viable option that was available to them. But since training a talent pool in-house is not cheap either, most of them felt that a group of companies coming together to have a common training was something that they were willing to try out.

Specialization is the key : It was interesting to see the CXOs swear by their companies that they would not work on the projects that don't pay them well (read as 15$/hour projects). Looks like they have learnt their lessons the hard-way. The problem with the 15$/hour projects is that they don't give the companies enough scope to innovate but takes up the resources of the company. One of the CXO went ahead and said "I would rather have people on bench rather than working on one such project".

Irrespective of the companies and the regions, it is a know fact that Drupal houses in India work very cheap. Their per hour rates are abysmal. Not many India companies are in a position to charge more than 50$/ hour for the development. The key here is specialization. The companies can cross this border only if they have a niche and they can promote themselves as specialists. Specialization doesn't come cheap and companies have to invest their time and resources on them. But the results are worth the efforts. The other advantage of the specialization is that it gives the companies an easy exit from the projects. So the companies have a definite deadline. They know when their entry is and they can plan when their exit should be. "Don't be a slave of your own creations" somebody from the panel rightly quoted.

Scaling Drupal Companies : Drupal is good for a freelancer. It is good for the startups too. But what next. How can Drupal companies scale? This was the question. Partnerships, Mergers and Acquisitions was the answer. Most of the Companies have European and UK partners who bag the projects and these companies take care of the executions. There was a CXO in the room, whose company was recently acquired. (Rahul mentioned this after taking his permission.)

Few of the CXO's were of the opinion that Acquia should partner more with the India companies and give them the much needed credibility, which the bigger corporations expect. But Acquia was of the opinion that they can only partner with the companies in India if they have a particular niche. Acquia also made it clear that they were not partnering with any companies in India, as most of them were into the whole development cycles and didn't have a niche of their own.

Exit strategies : This was something which I had never thought of until I attended the panel discussion. The fact that these people are thinking about the exit strategies proves that these people are considering Drupal seriously as a money making instrument, which is good for Drupal in particular and open source in general. I was just wondering if Acquia also has an exit strategy and what would that be.

If this was one perspective, Mohan from Azri solutions introduced another interesting perspective namely "Exit strategy from the clients". Most of the companies would have gone through this. Though the project if functionally complete, you still need to spend lot of time with the clients doing the menial tasks like content creation, formatting and changing the texts... Mohan rightfully pointed out that educating the clients is the best solution for this. Have a workshop with the technical team of the clients and transfer the most of the responsibilities to their in-house team so that our valued time can be spent on something more productive.

Lack of visibility : Visibility of the Indian Drupal houses to me seemed to be Abysmal as always. Drupal houses from India not even featuring in the top ten for searches like "Drupal Companies India" only makes the things much worse. One of them brought this to the notice of the panel saying that when he actually wanted to give out a project to a Indian Drupal team, he was not able to find the names of most of the companies in the panel room. Pity! . The only SME that everybody felt had a better visibility was Srijan.

At-least in this angle, Drupal India still has long way to go. I have just reserved a domain called www.drupalenterprise.in I am planning to make it like a portal where drupal companies can list themselves, their details and their projects, so that it will be easier for the clients to find them. If you have any ideas or want to contribute to this project, write to me nkgokul at gmail dot com

Google+ and you : The same rules that apply in life apply in google+ too

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 06:58:00 +0000

Google+ = +You

Be yourself on google.

But you are different to different people. You have circles on Google+ You can be a writer in your writer circles and a zombie in your zombie circles.

Know what you want in your life. Know what you want from Google+ and Google+ can be that for you. You just need to know the right chrome extensions and the settings. If you want it to be like facebook, it can be. If you want it to be like twitter, it can be. But have patience, especially if you want it to be like facebook because your friends are gonna take some time to be on Google+.

Your life is boring if you don't have a good circle of friends. The same with Google+. If you don't have interesting people in your circles, then your stream is definitely going to be boring. Go find some interesting people. More the merrier, interesting the better.

They say "A man is known by the company he keeps" . In G+Arena we call it "A plusser is known by the people in his circles and the people in whose circles he is". You find some interesting people circle them and through them you find more like minded interesting people. For the second part(to be in interesting people's circles) keep reading.

When you see a bunch of people discussing your favorite topic, you join the conversation. When a see an interesting post go drop your opinion,add value. Adding comments to a post can be a great way to find like minded people. And once in a while skim through the comments of some interesting posts and you will find many like minded people who fit into your circles.

When you have too many friends, if is difficult to catch up. This can happen to you on Google+ too. Don't be in a hurry too add to many people into your circles. Thanks to circle sharing, if you are adding hundreds of people in one go you are not doing it right. Even if you want to circle people from shared circles, I suggest that you go through their profiles before adding them to your circles.

If you want to be famous, you must be interesting enough. If you are on Google+ to build your followers, then you must post interesting content regularly in whatever field that interests you. There is no shortcut :P

I am not popular but I am happy. I don't have thousand of followers on Google+. But I am still happy with Google+, because it has given me a chance to meet and converse with many interesting people. If not for Google+ I would never have been able to exchange a formal greeting with them, forget about discussions.

Live life your way. Don't follow others advice when you are happy with your life. Similarly all these are just my experiences that I thought might help you too. But if you are happy with Google+ the way you are using it now, I see no reason you should follow my advice.

Hey Girl!! Are you celebrating Independence Day?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 14:32:00 +0000

Come tomorrow we will all be celebrating the Independence Day. Few are just happy that they have got a three day weekend and they would be snoring away to glory tomorrow. There are other few who bring out the patriotism that was hidden with them for almost 365 days, barring a day or two when India beat Pakistan in cricket or when India won some sports tournament. There are very few others who will remember those great men who sacrificed their lives and freedom and so that we have freedom of speech, expression and taking the responsibility of our lives.

Tomorrow we will see so many guys riding up on biked holding the national flag, their head held high that they are living in a nation which uphold independence. But the irony is that the same guy would have asked his sister/wife to stay back at home. The same guy would have asked his daughter to stay back at home. On one side we feel proud about ourselves for upholding these ideals on the other side we are blind to the Freedom that is snatched from our own sisters, wives and daughters at home. What is more disturbing is that this has never occurred to our minds. Why so? The only thing I can think of as reason is the kind of upbringing we have had. In most of the families, a girl who wants to be independent and live her life on her own terms is always seen as liability. Isn't it strange that, "When a guys wants to do something on his own, people call him independent. But when a girls wants to do something on her own, she is termed Rebellious". We live in such a hypocritic society and everybody seems to blissfully ignorant about the same.

The issue is not just with the guys. Its the same with the girls too. If you are a girl there is a high probability that you have heard these dialogues from some Old lady somewhere some time – “Girls these days have changed, they don’t have any responsibility they don’t know how to cook, they won’t wear sarees, they won’t wear burka, they won’t follow traditions..culture, and they don’t respect elders so on and so forth”. The irony is that the same girl who felt suffocated when her parents thrust so many rules on her, when she goes on to become a woman will, try to thrust the same rules on her daughter. What a pity! Coming from their mothers who are considered as the source of wisdom by many girls, they give in. And hence a girl who was a topper in her class till her degree, all of a sudden turns out into a unrecognized (sorry recognized at home) house-wife, who will cook a good meal and raise her kid. All that her degree was worth is to help her kid to do home work (wow topper in degree to a house-wife doing some daily chores). What a life? or should I say what an irony of life .

Haven't you come across a friend of yours(a girl) who has wants to be independent but gives up her job as it is not a tradition in their families to work after marriage? Haven't you come across a colleague of your who doesn't want to come for a trip as her parents don't agree? Haven't you come across a friend of yours who is always lively and bubbly, but suddenly goes silent because her boy-friend is over possessive? Haven't you come across a friend who has felt ashamed in-front of a crowd because she has got to go to a rest room as she is having her cycles? What do we do in such circumstances? We all maintain our golden silence. We may not be able to do much, but our understanding of their problems and our small reassurances can give them a mountain of hope.

So what can you do as a boy?

1.) If you have a sister at home, make sure that she gets the same treatment that you do.
2.) Never tell her things that can shatter her self-confidence and do your bit so that she gets what she rightfully deserves.
3.) If you have girl-friend or a wife, you can be protective about her. But make sure that it doesn't suffocate her.
4.) When a friend in your gang says or does something that might hurt the modesty of a girl in the team, educate him.
5.) Try to suppress your MALE-EGO which has no logical reason. Stop being a MCP.

What if you are girl

1.) Stand up for yourself and speak out. Remember you can't blame somebody for spoiling your life, if you don't stand up for yourself. But when you stand up you got to take the responsibility for you life. And when you don't speak for yourself, you are doing the greatest harm to yourself.
2.) When you can't stand up for yourself, at-least speak for yourself. When you can't speak for yourself at-least make sure that the person who is doing the injustice to you feels guilty about it.
3.) Whether you are part of a gang of friends or team at office or family at home, try to establish a system where there is reward for good treating girls well and a high cost of treating girls badly.
4.) Nobody wants to be seen as an individual or an organisation that doesn't respect women. This is independent of what they are actually. When somebody treats a girl badly, make sure that the other guys in the team chide him for that. As an individual one may treat girl badly, but in-front of a group nobody want to be seen as MCP. Use this to your advantage.
5.) One of the things that you should be familiar is the MALE-EGO. You should tie the good treatment towards women with this. After all he is no man who cannot respect a woman. Imprint this in the minds of men who are around you in your daily lives. A real man respects a lady, and his lady respects him for that.

(Few of the above may go wrong for girls. So make sure that you have the support of at-least few good men. And I strongly believe there are at-least a few good men irrespective of where you belong)

I have taken up my Independence Day resolution. What about you ?

A society in which a woman is not entitled to have her self respect, shall decay in the course of time; as depriving a woman of her self respect is like disrespecting the very essence of our existence : Motherhood.

Right to Information Act

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:18:00 +0000

Recently I came across a video about RTI. It was 44 mins long. So I had to postpone watching the video 4 times. I thought it is better to put down the important notes from the video, so that at-least lazy people like me can know the gist in few minutes. These are just my observations from the video . Please visit RTI site for the authentic data.

Question 1 : What is RTI?
Answer : RTI is an acronym of Right To Information.

Question 2 : How is RTI a part of our fundamental rights..?
Answer : Right to freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental right. People cannot speak or express when they don't know. So you are entitled to your right to information and and hence RTI forms a fundamental right.

Question 3 : What are the rights I am entitled to under RTI?

Ask for any information from the government.
Inspect any government document.
Ask for photocopies of any government document.
Inspect any government work.
Ask for sample of materials of any government work.

Question 4 : How do I apply for any information under RTI?
Answer   4 : Write your application in a plain white paper, like you do for your leave application ;) and submit it to the public information officer(PIO) in the government office from which you want to collect information. Keep a photocopy of the application.

Question 5 : Whom to contact?
Answer   5 : Every government office will have Public Information Officer(PIO) and you submit your application to him by paying a nominal fee. Don't forget to take the receipt for your payment.
629 post offices have been designated as Assistant Public Information Officer(APIOs). This means that you can go to any of these post offices and submit your fee and application at the RTI counter in these post offices. They will issue you a receipt and acknowledgement and it is the responsibility of that post office to deliver it to the right PIO. The list of these post offices is given at http://www.indiapost.gov.in/rtimanual16a.html

Question 6 : What if I don't get a response?
Answer 6    : Your RTI application is supposed to get a response in a max of 35 days, failing which the salary of the employee is liable to deduction.

Question 7 : Has RTI been successful?
Answer 7      : RTI has been successful in many cases. And it has been effectively used by the poor and deprived. So there is no reason it can't be successful with the educated ones like us.

Question 8 : IS RTI really powerful ?
Answer 8        : RTI application can be a powerful alternative to bribery in the government offices. When you pay a bribe the officials are not liable to you, but when you file a RTI they are liable to answer you. RTI along with lokpal can bring about the much awaited transparency in the government offices. RTI will make the babus liable to disclose any information that people request whereas Lokpal would make all the offenders punishable irrespective of their positions. In total these laws will put the power into the safest hands in a democracy : People.

Question 9 : What can I do after knowing all this ?
Answer 9       : As an assignment try to file an RTI in the government office nearest to you. You can request for information like who the contractor for the incomplete road is, why the METRO project is getting delayed, why there are no enough government in your office route, list of all the MLA's of your area in the last 20 years. You can think of many more such information that might help you to know more about the government spendings or which will prompt the officials to think twice before doing something wrong.
You can also create awareness about RTI among your friends and colleagues,

Question 10 (taken from RTI site): How does this law help me in getting my work done? Give me a proof
Answer 10 :
Let us take the case of Nannu. He was not being given his ration card. But when he applied under RTI, he was given a card within a week. What did Nannu ask? He asked the following questions:

I filed an application for a duplicate ration card on 27^thJanuary 2004. Please tell me the daily progress made on my application so far. i.e. when did my application reach which officer, for how long did it stay with that officer and what did he/she do during that period?
According to the rules, my card should have been made in 10 days. However, it is more than three months now. Please give the names and designations of the officials who were supposed to take action on my application and who have not done so?
What action would be taken against these officials for not doing their work and for causing harassment to the public? By when would that action be taken?
By when would I get my card now?

In normal circumstances, such an application would be thrown in a dustbin. But this law says that the Government has to reply in 30 days. If they don’t do that, their salary could be deducted. Now, it is not easy to answer these questions.
The first question is – please provide the daily progress made on my application.
There is no progress made. But the government officials cannot write in these many words that they have not acted for so many months. Else that would be admission of guilt on paper.
The next question is – please provide the names and designations of the officers who were supposed to take action on my application and who had not done so
If the government provides names and designations of the officials, their responsibility gets fixed. Any officer is most scared of fixing of responsibility against him in this manner. So, the moment one files such an application, his/her pending work is done.

For a full list of FAQs about RTI visit RTI site

Sometimes

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 15:35:00 +0000

Sometimes you have to set your eyes off the target to enjoy the race. You loose the race, you can be happy that you enjoyed the race at-least. And you win the race, Bingo. What good is winning a race if you didn't enjoy the race at all.

Caveat : I do believe in goal setting and slogging for your goals. It' just that I don't slog, when I don't like something.

Ads : Short and expressive

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 06:48:00 +0000

Can you put across an idea effectively in less than 10 seconds with an audience that you have no connection with? Ads answers affirmatively to this. And that is the reason I have always believed that ads are the best form to show case one's talents if one is interested in fields like acting, direction and cinema.

Marketing in itself is a huge market and it is in-fact a science. It is as much science as math or physics is. But instead of studying static entities like geography and algebra, it ties to analize the more dynamic entity namely human beings. With dwindling attention span of the current generation it is really a difficult task to capture the imagination of the you and old alike. But there are few marketing campaigns that achieve this feat seamlessly.
And the marketing campaign of Kotak Mahindra on the eve of turning 25 is one such example.

This was their ad campaign in print

and these are there videos in the TV and internet.

and this is their website for the event http://25.kotak.com/

Why was I impressed with the ad campaign?

Marketing campaign spread over print, media and internet(you tube banner ad).
Print ad on TOI first two pages. Pleasing + Capturing the attention + User participation.
Youtube Videos. Short + Creative + Emotional appeal + No on the face promotion of products.
Over all : Celebration of 25th anniversary can easily connect with you and old alike.
Over all : Concentrating on the long term brand building rather than promotion of individual products.

3G : Mom is the world..

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:34:00 +0000

"Guys of your age should be going out with girlfriends and having fun, Shravan" she told.

Shravan is her only son and her only hope in life. Two decades ago when her husband died, she lost all hopes and was crestfallen. Plans of killing herself crossed her mind too. But when she looked into the innocent eyes of Shravan, she knew she had to live and indeed she did. She got back to her life. But there was no life in her. She started to hate everything around her. She locked all the doors around her which would lead to the world outside. Her only connection to the outside world was Shravan. And Shravan made sure that his Mom didn't miss the world too much. Though he didn't hate the world like his mom did, he didn't find it interesting. His Mom was the world to him. He felt comfortable with him Mom and he was happy being that way. He didn't feel the need for extra love and care from others as his mom always made sure that he gets enough.

"May be thats true. But they don't have a Mom like you :) So they have to. I don't know Mom. Whenever I sleep on your laps, I feel so protected and get peace of mind. I am happy for that. I have no regrets of not having a Girl Friend" said Shravan. They hugged each other and he slept on her laps.

"Wake up Shravan, Its 7 you need to go office..", the sound brought him back from sleep. He woke up to see the smiling face of him mom. This had been the routine right from the day his Dad had expired. He never woke up without looking at his mom's face. The smile on her face was his driving force. He spoke to his Mom for sometime and got ready for the office. He was having breakfast and the bell rang. It was the signal from his friend Sharath, who was waiting for him outside. "Ok Mom, I am leaving to office", Shravan said looking into his phone and he left.

She (Shravan's Mom) had died 2 years ago. Shravan was in a situation similar to what his Mom was in a few decades ago, but this time it was more worse because he had no one else. Nobody ever imagined that he could cope up with the loss. Looking at the way he had handled himself for the first few days after his Mom's demise, everybody felt that he would not last longer than a week or so. But thanks to the new app 3G Buddy(Virtual simulation of your loved ones), which brought back his mother to life and hence saved a life (or should i say two.?).

There are many Shravans out there in the world. I wish 3G Life will being their loved ones back to life.

What is your October Indirank...?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 15:00:00 +0000

The long wait for the October Indirank is finally over. And the results are here. And I am not happy with my results. My previous ranking was 50 and so is my current ranking. When life is all about growth, no growth : no life. And stagnancy stinks.....

Since I have blogged regularly of late and am having decent traffic, I naturally expected my rank to improve. And so I am disappointed :(

Guys please console and motivate me to keep blogging :) Hey did I tell you that I wrote my first 55er.

I like the way you lie : My first 55er

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:34:00 +0000

All I wanted was to hang around her and have some fun. But she was a serious kind. I looked deep into her eyes and said “Love you, dear” . "I like the way you lie", she said and walked away. As she was walking away, I heard the words “But still I love you”.

Highlights : Bangalore Indiblogger Meet

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 18:53:00 +0000

When : 3rd October 2010
Where : Fortune Park JP Celestial
What : Indiblogger Meet
Twitter : @indiblogger
Trending : #indiblr

There are going to be a zillion posts on this topic. So i will only write about the highlights.

Awesome location : Fortune Park JP Celestial.
Cave like entrance and lots of cavemen (read as indipolice)
More than 250 bloggers.
Live tweet streaming was great and innovative.
Meet started 20 mins late.
Girls to boys ratio was very low, and only few hot chicks :(
Introductions were long and a bit boring. But a wide variety of folk were out there
3 lucky guys walked away with HP printers for theirs intros. I didn't get any though I deserved one
Write on our backs : The comments galore, wish my blog had so many comments
15 mins wasted on mobile blogging, he could have as well just shared the link http://m.wordpress.com/
Case study by Raghava(who called himself bling photographer) was inspirational
Open discussion for guidelines of the forum.(Indiblogger teams attempt to portray themselves as democratic)
Three winners for sprit of bangalore photo contest.
A clean,simple,great ppt on how HP is adapting to the new generation demands.
Snacks and tea time. Samosas were worth loosing the sunday after-noon nap.
Promotion of social causes in the meet was nice :)
I mentioned about my sanskrit site
Voila we got indiblogger T shirt...

Live Tweets

And few things off the record ....

The most famous line : I write some crap stories on my blog
The most innovative idea of the meet : IndiBRA
The coolest chick in the house : Indipolice chick at registration desk (man she was hot)

Who is she?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 06:34:00 +0000

Of late I was thinking "Who is my closest companion.?"

Mom?.. Dad?..Bro?..(from the title you know it's a female) Colleague?.. Friend?... Nope

Let me tell you about her

The first thing I do when I wake up is hold her in my hands gently and stare at her lovely face to see if she has got something to say to me. Most of the days I am reluctant to wake up and feel like sleeping again holding her in my hands. If I don't find her find on my bed when I wake up, I jump out in a hurry, and start searching for her frenziedly. My heart beat becomes normal only after finding her. My day starts with her and ends with her, barring bath (I should admit that generally I don't take her along for bath, for some strange reason.) Barring that she is with me 24/7. She watches me getting dressed up, she is with me when I have my breakfast,I decide when to go office only after looking at her,she is with me when I ride to office, she sings for me when I am riding. She sits by my side when I work, she accompanies me when I go for lunch, she is there for me whenever I need her. Most of my friends envy me because of her. Some feel I don't deserve her while others while others feel she is too obliging. A few true friends feel that I give her too much attention. Some of my friends really get pissed off when I hold her close to me and start playing with her in-front of them;). But I can't help it. Well most of my day surrounds her and I enjoy every second of it. In fact my day ends with her in my bed. Sometimes I sleep just holding her in my hands. At other times when I don't I just wake up, stare at her for some time, play with her then get back to sleep.

Oops I forgot to tell you that I put her on charge before I sleep!!!. Don't be confused I was speaking about my phone ;) Yes indeed my phone is my closest companion and this is true for most people. And hence what I expect from my phone is what I expect from my companion.

The features I wish my phone had........... My favorite phone would be

A phone with a mood detector : I think this is what differentiates a companion from a phone. Our best friends are the ones who can read our moods very well. They know when to shut up and when to pull our legs. I wish my phone could do the same. A phone that can detect my mood and play songs accordingly.
Just imagine if your phone could play your favorite romantic song in low volume when you are thinking about the moments you had spent with your GF. Or just imagine if your phone can constantly remind you about your GF's birthday and suggest you the kind of gift you can get for her(This one would be an instant hit with the guys).
Just imagine if your phone could suggest you with names of your best friends or autodial them when you are not in good mood.
Just imagine if your phone could cool your nerves when you are tensed.
Or at last imagine if your phone could search the net for a hot video of your taste and start playing it when you get horny ;)

A phone that I can converse with : Somebody please get rid of these keyboards from phone. I just hate them. Until and unless phones become interactive they are just machines. They can't become your companions if you cant talk to them. Touch phones are fine but phones with which we can converse will be great. I feel like we are still in stone age when I need to type, to convey my thoughts or do something. A phone should be your PA. You just tell you PA to do something. How to do it is her headache. You don't type for her. If talking with your phone is one part, the phone talking back to you to convey something is the other part.

A phone that simplifies social networking : I get to know what my friends are upto through social networking. So sharing on a networking site has to be simple, easy and an enjoyable process. Just click a photo and say share it on facebook as my profile image. And dhuumm.. my friends should be able to see it in their updates. It should reduce the time lag :)
And the other aspect is more social networking has to be incorporated into my phone. When I play a song on my player in the phone, I should know how many of my friends like the particular song. After all we the youngsters live our lives through social networking, sharing is a part of our lives and we share our lives. So why not through our phones?

In short a phone to me is

"Somebody with whom you can SHARE your LIFE and something through which you can SHARE your LIFE with others"

Tata DOCOMO OneTouch Net Phone promises to be one such phone. Let wait and see.....

MBA is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criteria for being a leader.(written for TestFunda)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 04:56:00 +0000

If you are still waiting for the answer of the question "Can an MBA alone make a leader?", the answer if definite "NO" in capital letters. I wish leadership had a clear definition like the one MBA has. But the truth is that it doesn't. MBA is an acronym for Master of Business Administration, and that is what it does.Make you a Master in Business Administration. But we all know that Leadership is much more than that. There are innumerous masters in this world, but hardly a few leaders.

MBA might have Leadership as one of the subjects in one of the semesters, but this in no way symbolizes that leadership is a part of MBA and having an MBA alone can make you a leader. I am not saying that an MBA doesn't instill leadership qualities but my view point is that "MBA is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criteria for being a leader."

Since Data Interpretation(DI) is an important requisite for an MBA, lets interpret the data at hand.

Data : MBA is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criteria for being a leader.

The data consists of two statements. For the given data to be true both the statements have to be true. So lets verify the truthfulness of both these sentences.

Statement 1 : MBA is not necessary for being a leader

Proof : We have many leaders who do not hold a MBA degree.

Statement 2 : MBA is not sufficient for being a leader

Proof : We have many people with MBA degrees but not considered as leaders.

By proving that Statement 1 and Statement 2 are true, I have verified the given data and hence in the process justified my title which was the sole purpose of this article.

Retype Your Password : Why should I ?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:41:00 +0000

I have created countless accounts online, needless to say that i use only a small fraction of them in reality. In the process of creating these accounts i would have filled hundred if not thousands of forms which say Type your password in one row and Retype you password in the succeeding row. But I had never ever seriously analyzed as to what I gain and what I loose by Retyping my password.

Recently I created an account and happily filled the Type your password and Retype your password fields in the form. I browsed the site that day. Few days later I tried to login to the website. "The username and passwords don't match" the server scowled at me. Bingo!! I tried few combinations, but all in vain. Rather than trying to recover my password, I set about to understand what had actually conspired against me.

And here goes my story : (Read this paragraph at the end)

What had actually happened was that I had mistyped my password. That's fair enough as all of us make mistakes. But what saddens me is that i had mistyped while retyping the password. Thats also acceptable though rare. But what interests me is that in both the cases my typos were same. So the poor system assumed that, what I typed was the actual password. And there I was blissfully ignorant of the my blunder. It would have been a tedious process to regain my password, if I had tried. But I didn't as I was busy analyzing what had happened and I was content with what I was doing.

Now lets analyse all the scenarios that arise in this context and see whether the extra effort we put in retyping the password is worth it. There are four scenarios.

	Password[P] Correct	Password[P] Wrong
Retype Password[RP] Correct	Case I (P = RP)	Case II (P != RP)
Retype Password[RP] Wrong	Case III (P != RP)	Case IV (P = RP) OR (P !=RP) V VI

Step 1 : Enter your Password

Step 2 : Retype your password

After completing Step 2, we can't differentiate between case I and V. After step 2 we also can't differentiate between Case II, Case III and case VI

Case I : Both Password and Retype password are correct - OK Scenario

Step 1 : The password is correct. So there is no need of Step 2, but since we don't know that password is correct we go to Step 2. That is where are trying to eliminate Case II here. But in the process we are creating chances for Case III, which is an unfavorable one.

Step 2 : Retype your password is also correct. Hence we ended up in case, but we could as well have ended up in Case III.

Case II : Password is wrong and Retype password is correct - Ideal scenario

Step 1 : The password is incorrect. So in the absence of Step 2, your account would have been created with wrong password.

Step 2 : Retype your password is correct and hence you catch hold of the error in Step 1. But we could have as well ended up in Case IV

Case III : Password is correct but Retype password is wrong - A bad scenario

Step 1 : The password is correct. But at this step since we don't know that, we proceed to Step 2

Step 2 : The Retype password is wrong. Oooops though the password in Step 1 was correct we ended up in Case III and we will have to create our login again.

Case IV : Password is wrong but Retype password is wrong - A good/dangerous scenario

Step 1 : The password is wrong. Good that we have step 2

Step 2 : The Retype password is also wrong. Shit how could we mistype in second attempt also.

Now this is where this particular case gets interesting, if the typos in step1 and step 2 are different then we are saved and we have good scenario. It the typos in step 1 and step 2 happen to be the same then we are in for a toss. That's dangerous situation. Because we end up in what we tried to avoid. We will be erring with more confidence that we are right, which i think is more dangerous.

This is just the common sense analysis, the mathematical analysis with the use of probability shall follow ...

Google instant : Change the way you search

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 03:37:00 +0000

The google instant was an instant hit. The proof was instantisation of google maps, youtube,bing so on and so forth. So now we have moved from instant coffee and instant chats to instant search. Googling has easily become one of the things a internet buff does on a regular basis. Whether you are looking out for a location in a google map, searching for a nice hotel on burp.com or searching for an instant video on youtube what you are doing basically is search. So making google(read as search) instant definitely goes a long way in saving a lot of time.

But what baffles me is with bigwigs like google, microsoft and yahoo fighting for monopoly over search(as it is the gateway to the world of lucrative business namely internet), what took them so long to instantise search. The only reason that comes to my mind is lack of resources. In place of one hit/query on the server, the current instant google will hit the server more than 5 times for an average query. So that's like saying that the google servers must be five times bigger in capacity or five times efficient in handling the search queries. That might seem to be asking for too much but still that seems to me like a lame excuse these bigwigs can give.

The unusual spin off of google instant is that Japanese addresses are showing more quickly on google instant maps than its counter-part western addresses. Let's find out the reasons but first lets understand the japanese addressing systems. Japanese addresses reflect the primacy of the group in Japan. They proceed from the general (the prefecture, or Japan itself for mail to Japan) to the particular (the addressee). So the general address looks like this

107 Tokyo-to, Minato-ku,
Akasaka 1-chome,
10-ban, 5-go,
Watanabe Kazuo

It starts from the generic address Tokyo and moves to the specific addressee name Watanabe Kazuo in the order. Japanese got lucky as their addresses work the same way as google instant does.

Google instant is a Progressively Refining Search(A term i have come out with). Put in simple terms, with each keyword enter your search gets refined. So you can see your search getting refined with every typing letter. There are two ways you can build your search query now.

Start with the most specific term and then move to the generic term.
Start with the most generic term and then move to the specific term.

The first method is the traditional way we use to search. An ex : The famous hotels in bangalore,India

This is how our search queries used to be till now. Lets analise this under the current google instant search. The moment you type good google is confused as to what get for you as there are many things which are good. then when you say hotels it tries get you hotels from all over the world, whereas hotel in bangalore was what you were looking for. :(

The second method is the query suited to google instant. Since google instant is a Progressively Refining Search, starting with the most generic term and then moving to the specific term goes with the flow and you can see the search results getting better as you type. So now our search query will be India bangalore hotels famous. So when you type india google will fetch results only from india, and as you type bangalore the results will be refined for banglaore, and when you type hotels it gets you the list of hotels in banglaore. So as you keep typing your query the search keeps getting refined. ("Hotels, India bangalore good" may be a more efficient query)

So the next time you are googling my name remember the query has to be India,Karnataka,Bangalore,Mindtree Gokul

Caveat : There are exceptions to this rule. Comment on this post if you want to discuss. But remember that it still holds good if you are looking out for a geographical location.

Well Done Omar

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:21:00 +0000

"When people hurl stones at you, convert them into your milestones" goes a quote.

But today Stone-Pelting(SP) has taken a completely different form.

Today SP symbolizes the unrest among the youth of a state in which it(youth) constitutes more than 50% of the population.
SP proves that unrest among the youth of the state or nation is the last thing that a government can afford.
SP symbolizes the way the weak protest against the mighty state that fails to connect with the people of the state.
SP defines the culminating point of the downfall of a minister who was considered as the most successful young politician to one whose political future is in question.
SP has become a menace which the army can neither face nor suppress. Restraining is the only option that they have. I can't even call it an alternative, since that is the only way.
Now it is forcing the minister who had distanced himself from the crowds, to try so hard just to get their acceptance.

I am a big fan of Omar Abdullah.( Don't ask me why? He was young, he was charismatic and he looked to be a promising politician in making) And I felt let down after his fall in popularity. :(

But the way he handled himself when a shoe was hurled at him, reiterated my faith in him.

Omar's response : "I am not upset that a person protested. The fact that he threw a shoe and not a stone, speaks for itself"

That was commendable. He used a thoughtless action of a person, to send a strong message to the people of J & K. Though it was a nice message that he sent across and in a very good way, that in itself is not sufficient. People of J & K expect a lot of actions from him. It is the time he deliver his promises.

I feel that Omar got few things wrong in his journey and he definitely paid for them. But i strongly feel that has the ability to correct them and move on. And taking this as an opportunity to connect with the masses of the valley state and understand their situation and the problems they are facing(which no one has done till date) if he can work out an amicable solution that will be his way to stardom and immortality. And thousands of good wishes of the masses of the valley state which are genuine.

And genuine wishes will never go un-realised.

Caveat : So does the genuine curses.....

ATMAON : A simple line that keeps you humble

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:08:00 +0000

ATMAON : Though this word sounds like a sanskrit word(In sanskrit atmaon means souls), it is just an acronym for my favorite phrase "According to me, as of now". Repeating these words in your mind when you are in a discussion, debate, fight, quarrel or when you are giving a lecture, advice, suggestion or when you are trying to prove a point to someone keeps your feet grounded, mind sane and heart happy.

ATMAON has two halves ATM and AON. Both of which are equally important.

ATM : According To Me

The first half (According To Me) says that whatever you are saying is your opinion. It reminds that what you are saying need be the truth but is only your perception of truth.(I am assuming that you are not trying to fool somebody with views which you consider are not true). It also reminds you that since it is your opinion, the person with whom you are interacting is also entitled to his view, which may or may not be same as yours. Anyone can easily handle a person who agrees with you. But handling a person who disagrees with you, is what separates the intellectuals from the lay men. It doesn't mean that you accept the views which are against your principles. It only says thats you should provide enough room for opinions which are not aligned to your views, especially the ones which are polar opposite of yours.

Well, before ending this let me say all these views are According To Me.

AON : As Of Now

If the first part makes sure that we respect others views and opinions, the second part(As Of Now) takes it ahead and points that the our own views and opinions change with time. Haven't you experienced this so many times? My views about two things has changed drastically over the time. They are divorce and abortion.

Similarly most of our views change with time and changing society. What you consider wrong today may become right tomorrow and vice versa. So just remember that your views are not going to be the same. But remember that your perception of what is good and bad may change, but your perception of right and wrong should not keep changing very frequently.

So next when you go about proving your point to somebody else, just say to yourself "According to me, as of now" and the person on the other side can definitely sense the difference. I pomise (sorry according to me as of now they will sense the difference.)

Language is an abstraction of thought

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 19:39:00 +0000

Expression of thought is what communications is all about. Language is an abstraction of thought. Language can never become communication as a thought can never be expressed completely. And if at all a thought can be expressed completely, the language used for it would be a perfect language, which would be nothing but communication. I came to understand the tight coupling between thought, language and communication very recently. It was a sweet coincidence. To do a profile picture for my website's fan-page, i was trying to create an image out of the introduction that i had written for an article titled Improve your vocabulary. The intro was about language and communication. I was amazed by the output I got. Here goes the image and it is followed by the introduction i wrote.

Click on the image or visit www.facebook.com/Aziteez to get a Tee of this image.

Language is an abstraction of thought. A thought in itself is of no significance in the real world, because it needs the support of language if it has to be appreciated or implemented . All these knols, articles, plethora of information available on the internet is an attempt(though an unsuccessful one) to catpture and express that thought. Language comes nowhere close to the actual communication of the thought from the person who conceived the thought to the person with whom he is trying to communicate. Man from the time immemorial has been trying to invent new words so that he can express his thought more clearly and lucidly, hence trying to communicate more effectively. But he is no where close to the actual communication.The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use and the list still keeps growing. We come out with a list of new words every year only to realise that there is a vacuum in the language for creating many more such lists. It is like space : the more you explore, you realise that much more is yet to be explored. But one thing is for sure, greater the number of words you know and deeper the unerstanding of them, better are your chances of communicating an idea or thought successfully. And hence better are your chances of succeeding in your workplace and life.

The first day in JEMS

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:41:00 +0000

As mentioned in my previous article, after getting the tips from my Dad I was all set to go to the much awaited school(It was called Jyothi Vidya Nikethan and I still prefer that name to Jyothi English Medium School). I don't remember how the days prior to the school-opening passed. All I can remember is that my mother had already started tutoring me. She would try to get the help from everybody and anybody whom she considered was better than her in tutoring me. But what she doesn't know is, even to this day I consider her as the best teacher I have met tell date. My view is not opinionated just because I am her son, but rather my view is justified by the innovative ways she uses in teaching. Anybody who has been tutored by my Mom will readily agree to this. So I used to prefer my Mom over everybody else in tutoring me.

I had looked up so much for the first day of the school. The kind of enthusiasm I had was contagious and boundless. But I also had an equal share of my own fears and apprehensions. In-spite of all this excitement I can't remember much about how my first day was. I can't recall how I spent much of the day or whom I spoke to. I don't remember what my parents asked when I came back from school or what I answered them. It feels so weird considering that the day was such an important one. But still one incident on the first day remains crystal clear in my mind. I was wearing the pink and brown uniform, a tie, a belt and shoes(I had never worn a tie,belt or shoe as a part of uniform in my previous school, so this was special to me). I sat in a bench not at the back but somewhere close to the back row. I was all into myself. That was my way of feel safe and secure as I was not able to understand a word of what my teacher was telling. It was all in English and english was foreign to me. The language was alien and so were the people. I didn't even feel like raising my head and looking at other students. I was scared. I felt what if they ask me something in English and I am not able to answer. I didn't even look at the teacher fearing she might ask me some questions noticing that I am a new student. To my luck (or rather the lack of it) , each period was spread over a span of one and a half hours. That seemed like eternity to me and I cursed whosoever came up with such an idea.

It was at this time that shadow of somebody fell in the classroom as it blocked the sunlight coming from the door. The lady who blocked the sun-rays was none other than my aunt. She might have blocked the rays coming from the sun, but she gave rise to new rays in my heart and those were the rays of hope. The silver lining around her formed because of the silhouette appeared to me like a silver lining on the dark cloud in my heart. She gave a reassuring smile when I looked at her which made me feel at home. She said something to the teacher in the class to which the teacher responded affirmatively nodding the head top to bottom. My aunt looked back at me, smiled and left the class. I felt a lot better then and felt comfortable. I could not understand what she told to the teacher in the class. But the very fact that she told it in english and that the teacher responded affirmatively to what she told, made me feel proud of her. I think she must have told "This is my niece. He is new to this class and he doesn't know to speak english. Take care of him".