Gyaan Sutra

Setting up emails via SVN

2009-06-03T10:44:30Z

We finally managed to setup SVN to start sending us emails on each commit. I also wrote about it in more detail on the company blog.

If you’ve just started hosting svn on your server recently, you should take a look.

Slicehost : Setting up outgoing mail and Google Apps (postfix)

2009-02-16T19:59:26Z

We just moved to SliceHost recently and have been trying to get the server up and running. Every thing was super cool, but getting outgoing email to start working was a bitch.

What happens is that our poor little sendmail tries to be smart and deliver as much mail internally as possible. So even though the email address is set up to be used via Google Apps, sendmail tries to relay it internally and gets a ‘User unknown’.

This was confirmed by peeping into /var/log/mail.log and setting up a simple script in php which called the mail function. The user was never found, because we were looking at the wrong place.

Since I wasn’t prepared to spend a good part of the day on this thing, I decided to look out for options. After looking at a number of options, I decided to go ahead with ‘postfix’.

Let me take you step by step through the procedure :

1. As always, aptitude is there to help us out, so first we install postfix

sudo aptitude install postfix

2. During the installation, remember to choose the ‘Internet site’ option (because that is what you are doing. Right?)

3. Now that installation is done, it’s time to tell postfix that the domain is set up on Google Apps and not on the server (Actually we only tell postfix that the domain is not on the server). In the file /etc/postfix/mail.cnf we change the following

mydestination = mydomain.com, localhost.mydomain.com, localhost
to
mydestination = localhost.mydomain.com, localhost

4. Once that is done, just quit and restart (using sudo reboot) and you’re done.

In case you run into issues with the above, or find out a way to run this with sendmail, do let me know.

The ultimate Dev.D trailer

2009-02-10T15:30:09Z

The masterpiece of our times.

How the banks have shrunk

2009-02-06T03:42:13Z

Here is an unsettling picture from Bloomberg which shows how much the market capitalization of the major banks have shrunk in the last two years. (Click the link to view the full image)

How the banks have shrunk

Citibank and RBS look really bad, falling by almost 92.5% and 96.2%.

Interestingly, among this lot, HSBC has the maximum market cap these days, followed by JP Morgan and Sant ander.

Luckily market cap is not something startups have to worry about!

Fixing ‘Could not determine fully qualified name’ issue on localhost

2009-02-05T11:25:16Z

Whenever you setup Ubuntu on a new machine, every apache restart always ends up with a silly error which goes something like :

apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName

Other than the fact that it is slightly irritating, it is usually harmless.

But if you still want to get rid of it, so that you can have a seemingly beautiful apache2 restart, you can just add the following to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

ServerName vxtindia

Now apache knows what is your server called. But it will get an error if it tries to access the server name directly.

To fix this, you need to go to /etc/hosts and add your IP there.

192.168.1.10 vxtindia

That’s it. You are done!

Shifted to wordpress 2.7

2008-12-11T11:51:13Z

After a long wait, the new version of wordpress is finally here.

The admin looks really different from the old one. It looks like it has been stripped of all color. The lovely blue from version 2.6 has disappeared and can only be seen in traces.

One great new features it that you see the tag cloud while selecting the tags for the post. This really sucked in the older version.

Do let me know how were your experiences with it.

WTF of the day : Airtel blocks MyToday’s shortcode because of the Do No Call Registry

2008-11-20T16:27:56Z

Here’s an interesting story.

Big boy Airtel has decided to mess around with MyToday for a little while. They want MyToday to clear out 10% of their database which consists of people who have registered with the National Do Not Call Registry.

Airtel doesn’t care if all those people have REGISTERED to get those updates. Maybe in a few months my mom will not be able to call me because I’m in the NDNC registry.

Here is what Rajesh Jain, MD of Netcore had to say

What we are being told is that the 3.7 million MyToday database needs to be scrubbed to remove all NDNC-registered users (about 10% of the base). This just doesn’t make sense to me.

The alternatives Airtel has given us: either get in writing from the 370K subscribers that they want to get MyToday SMS channels, or get TRAI to issue a clarification on the NDNC rules they have issued. I don’t know which is more impossible! I have tried speaking to TRAI officials. All they say is that this is an issue between the operator (Airtel) and NetCore!

Way to go Airtel. Maybe if you get free from all this bull, you might start worrying about call quality and other nifty details like that, so that I don’t get disconnected 10 times in every call.

Though I’m just thinking if Airtel be sued for doing something like this or is it perfectly within the legal framework to be an as*h*le.

Quoted in TOI Mumbai today

2008-11-14T04:30:30Z

I got quoted in the Times of India, Mumbai edition today. (link).

Here is the complete article

MUMBAI: It’s not just CAT__the Common Admission Test to the coveted IIMs__that’s going online from next year. An increasing number of students are logging on to web portals for CAT coaching.

While online has been around for a while, it has never been in vogue till recently. Many, like Hemant Batra, a working professional from Mumbai, opted for online coaching for the sheer convenience. “It was difficult for me to attend a regular coaching class and juggle work side by side,” says Batra, who logged on to Testfunda.com for guidance on how to crack the CAT exam.

Batra, who will be appearing for the exam on Sunday, is more than satisfied with the coaching he received. “Their database of questions was exhaustive,” he adds.

Batra is one of nearly 35,000 people who have logged on to Testfunda.com in the last four months. The portal was set up by four IIM alumni in mid-July.

Another hugely successful website for CAT preparation__Ten A Day (tenaday.co.in)__has 45,344 users. The website was started by four IIM Ahmedabad graduates who passed out from the institution in 2007.

Regular coaching classes, too, are beginning to explore the online route to CAT coaching. They are also exploring a combination of online as well as offline methods of reaching out to their students.

“We are in the process of developing an online coaching option for our students. It should be ready in a couple of months,” says Gautam Puri, vice chairman, Career Launcher, a well-known CAT coaching class. “There already exists a market for online coaching, but CAT going online will definitely boost the segment,” he adds.

Arks Srinivas, director, TIME institute, another CAT coaching class, plans to offer students a variety of coaching options, which include complete online training, complete offline training as well as a combination of online and offline training.

According to Sudhanshu Raheja, who was earlier heading MBA Karma, an online portal for CAT preparation, a large share of the market for online CAT coaching consists of candidates who have already given the CAT exam once or twice before and do not want to waste time commuting to a coaching class.

While MBA Karma has temporarily shut shop as it could not keep pace with the demand, Raheja hopes to rejuvenate the website soon.

Quote of the day

2008-11-10T20:32:47Z

as if leadership in difficult times is best practiced with a green eyeshade and a calculator

From Mavericks at work

Bill Gates pays a visit to Eko.co.in

2008-11-10T17:52:19Z

The first time I had heard of Eko, I couldn’t resist the temptation to drop an email to its founders and ask if I could do anything for them. The moment you read up about what they are doing, you just want to be a part of it. (Though I never really made their website)

I have been following Anupam’s Blog ever since I read about them, and every once in a while he puts in a real gem there. But today he has got some really big news there.

In a world where startups participate in reality-show-like competitions to get publicity, here is one startup who is really doing things the right way.

LiveMint has a post about it too where they seem to get everything wrong. The title goes something like ‘Gates pays low-key visit to tech start-up pilot project‘ and then they talk about everything which nobody really gives a sh** about. For the record, Eko is not a tech pilot project, it is way beyond it. But we wouldn’t trust pen-totting journalists to get that before they make a million dollars in revenue.

Everything that you need to know about them is in this Shah-Rukh-Khan-style Main-Hoon-Na cartoon, which would have made it to presentation zen, had it not been in Hindi.

Anyways, even though I’m sure you know about it already, but here is it once again. Bill Gates paid a personal visit to our heroes from Eko in Uttam Nagar in Delhi.

Here is what Anupam writes

Bill Gates came across as a keen listener, sharp thinker, avid note-taker and someone who asked just the right questions. It is always a pleasure interacting with someone who just needs the bullet points and obvious sub-points never need to be stated :). To be honest, not many people in high positions to whom we have spoken to (or tried to speak to) were as down-to-earth and even a fraction as sharp as he was. In fact, most ‘top’ guys would rather send their subordinates for a visit rather than take the pain and time for visiting a place like this.

He even took time to visit ‘Gupta Medicos’ a shop which used be an ‘Eko Relationship Center’ to hear first-hand what they felt about Eko.

I think I ought to learn from Anupam about how to be so cool when something like this happens!!