I remember distinctly when GTalk was the main IM client for most. Yahoo Messenger, its main competitor, was big and bloated. Like most things Google at that time, GTalk and its GMail plugin were fast, clean and reliable.

Somehow, Google just lost love for GTalk. The Windows client did not get any update and the service became slow, buggy and unreliable. On my Android phone, the Talk client loses messages in between. The GMail Talk plugin keeps playing its own game of  disconnected — connecting — yeah, we are back — disconnected. To my knowledge, there isn’t any good iPad app for GTalk. Compare that to the omnipresent WhatsApp, and the ever improving Facebook Messenger, and you will wonder why is Google not interested in Talk.

To my naive mind earlier, the reason for Google’s lack of interest was that personal communications are not a big enough market. But, Apple’s launch of Facetime and iMessage, Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype, Facebook’s resolute efforts on Messenger, Samsung’s ChatOn etc have proved that my naive assumption was entirely incorrect.

Hangouts are one of the few/only interesting thing about Google+  right now. Instead  of building this we-will-kill Facebook product, what if Google had iterated on Talk and become the dominant online conversation tool.

I will update the post if I find any reason behind what happened.

Photo: flickr/hippydream

You need to start by exporting your WordPress database to a sql file . You can do it using phpMyAdmin.

Next, you need to copy your wp-content folder using a FTP program like FileZilla.

I then followed this excellent tutorial for moving a WordPress blog to Linode. This is a comprehensive tutorial which will guide you from the first step of signing up for Linode .

There are some errors and typos in that tutorial that you should take care of.

The correct syntax for importing your old wordpress database is

$ mysql -u username -p -h localhost Database-Name < data.sql

If you have a dedicated database server, replace localhost hostname with with actual server name or IP address. If while creating the user for the database at mysql prompt, you didn’t add the ” @localhost ” part, remove ” –h localhost”.

While editing wp-config.php, make sure that you enter the same prefix as in your old wordpress database in $WP_Prefix variable. You can find your old wp-prefix by examining the table names in your wordpress database.

In the tutorial linked above, there is a mistake in #protect wpconfig.php. It should be:

# protect wpconfig.php
 
order allow, deny
deny from all

The WordPress specific settings depend on how you have setup your permalinks. You will find those settings at Settings->Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard.

If you are hosting your WordPress blog in a sub-directory  like /blog, you should place your.htaccess file in /blog and not in /.

The uploads folder should be chmoded to 775 and not 755.

In this configuration, you won’t be able to update WordPress and its plugins from within the dashboard. WordPress will prompt you to enter FTP credentials. Don’t do that. The problem is that WordPress runs under apache’s username, which is www-data, and this user doesn’t has permissions to write to your wordpress folder. The secure way is to do updates manually from the shell. If you want  to be able to do it from the DashBoard, you should refer to this IRC log.

Basically, before updating, you need to run

chown -R www-data /path/to/the/wordpress/install/on/your/filesystem/

Revert it back to the default user after updating.

Hope these steps help you in moving WordPress to Linode. If there is anything that I am doing wrong, do point out in the comments.

If you are feeling great, please signup to Linode using my referral link.

My option was to keep the blogs on Dreamhost and then use AWS for my startup. Right  now, I am working alone on Allotrop, and I don’t want to spend the extra hours learning to manage AWS. Over-optimization is one of the more common mistakes we do. I will shift to Ec2 when needed. Also, after doing a fair bit of research, I found out that a cloud service like AWS makes sense once you expect traction. Allotrop is a few months away from launch, and I won’t spend any extra money than I absolutely need to.

By the way, if you are just starting out, and want to find a cheap shared host for your WordPress and class projects, go for WebFaction. It has awesome support for Django, Rails and other application frameworks.

• Why can’t site push to top or highlight the comments made by OP, my friends, and people who I have subscribed to on Facebook or follow on Twitter. I will be more interested in what they have to say.
• Give some method for the OP to highlight those threads which he finds more interesting.
• Also, pingbacks should work much better. Instead of just showing me a link, show me a snippet of the post. How am I supposed to know what to make out of it?
• No matter how good the tools get, comments will always depend on what kind of environment and level of debate people keep up on their sites. Fred Wilson’s AVC .com has the best comment network as far as I have seen.

I have primarily used Disqus and Facebook comments and the comment system used by WordPress, Tumblr etc. I am not aware of what Echo and IntenseDebate are up to.

Disqus is coming up with what they say is a new version of their product called Disqus 2012. Hope it fulfills few of the things on my list.

Photo Credit: flickr/missmiah

The second line translates to

All shopkeepers give this [the candies] instead of a 50paise or 1 rupee coin.

I came across this image on Facebook . Like many others, I am also irritated by  the replacement of good old 50p, 1 rupee coins with candies. I hear rumors that this is due to the apparent crisis of coins in circulation in the market. It may be true, or this may be a nice trick to increase the revenue of your friendly neighborhood  shop.

Whatever, I can’t wait for the next generation of mobile money to come here. Will Square be the answer?

]]> http://www.rohitmishra.me/blog/2012/03/16/i-need-my-change/feed/ 0 http://www.rohitmishra.me/blog/2012/03/16/i-need-my-change/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rohitmishra/cAvH/~3/D70cXuLN6hM/ http://www.rohitmishra.me/blog/2012/03/15/why-shutting-down-oink-is-not-a-good-move/#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:58:45 +0000 Rohit Mishra http://www.rohitmishra.me/blog/?p=162 Oink is a service, which lets you “rate everything”.  Built by Kevin Rose’s (of Digg fame) Milk Labs, Oink was launched in November, 2011. Rose’s popularity drove the app to 150k downloads by December.

Today, Milk Labs announced that it is closing down Oink and that users can download the data.

We started Milk Inc. (the company behind Oink) to rapidly build and test out new ideas. Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project, we’ve decided to shut it down to help focus our efforts.

There are a couple of problems:

a) What can you do with the downloaded data? Can you put it in Foursquare, Foodspotting etc? Shouldn’t Oink at least write some documentation for developers on how to use this data?

b) Aren’t we burning up users by asking them to rate things and then leaving them stranded after a few months? Rose’s popularity will generate enough media that users will sign up for his next “experiment”, but how difficult does this make getting new users for a startup with non-celebrity founders.

I am currently reading Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup and I agree with his beliefs about going as fast as possible through the build-measure-learn cycle. But, Ries tells us to pivot if we learn that our idea is not working. I am not sure what Milk Labs is doing here.

There is nothing unique about Milk Labs. Every startup wants to rapidly build and test new ideas. But, you also persevere with your startup. Work with your early adopters to improve the app. If you are so specific about just ‘testing’ an idea, then I think they should have mentioned in bold letters, that this is an app for testing purposes only. Right now, Oink seems as if it was built for collecting data.

I will start work on Allotrop, which will lets user list the things that they love using, seeing, eating etc. I know many startups and established companies are doing similar things, but this is still an unsolved problem. So, I will do my best to solve this problem. Like every other startup, I will also pivot if what I build doesn’t work. But, I will do my best to support my users because every second that they would have spent on Allotrop is precious. It means something.

More than good examples, I look for bad examples. I decide that no matter what happens, I will never do something like this. For me, Oink’s legacy will be of a bad example.

Update: In the Hacker News thread of the original announcement, many people have commended Rose for sticking to what he said and closing down Oink when it didn’t get traction. They argue that investors invested their money in Milk Inc., the parent company and not Oink. That is sad about our time. We care more about investors’ return than users. You don’t build a startup for investors’ returns. You build it for solving your users’ problems and giving them a great experience. I strongly recommend reading this post by ex-Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith on why he left the investment firm.

Tip: Hacker News 

Firstpost has a good piece on how the Indian police and media go after the victim of a rape and expose her identity ignoring all established human right laws and judgments on privacy by the Supreme Court.

It is imperative that the governments both at the center and in the states work together to establish how the police deals with the media to control flow of information in cases such as these. Also, the government, which is ever too eager to play up the value of censorship, should sit together with the representatives of electronic and print media, and establish guidelines which prevent the identity of victims to be disclosed.

Also, we as citizens of a democratic country need to respect others’ rights. When people see that a girl working in a pub beyond midnight got raped, they somehow manage to rationalize it.

What was the girl doing so late? She brought it upon herself. What was she wearing? Was she drunk? Was she roaming out with friends?

Such chatter will take place at most places. Lets understand that none of this is our business and none of this justifies rape. What is morally right varies a lot in this country of a billion people. But when something happens which is illegal by law, our morals shouldn’t cloud how we respond to it.

Update: The Times of India is reporting that the Gurgaon police has invoked an archaic law which prohibits women from working in a shopping mall, pub or commercial establishment after 8pm without prior permission from the labor department. The Police has put the entire onus on safety of women on the shoulders of mall and pub owners. Instead of ensuring safety of women and maintaining a rule of law, they want to prohibit women from having equal opportunity to work. The fact that such laws exist and are used by our police is a shame to our democracy.

But, I don’t like the idea that startups make us push for them before even letting us see a sneak peek of their product. I thought I am the only one who feels so, but then I read about Eric Ries’ experience at IMVU in his book The Lean Startup.

Context: IMVU had called a 17-year old girl to their office to try out their product. She liked building a 3D avatar of herself, and then they got her to download an IM client.

Excerpt from the book 

“Okay, invite one of your friends to chat.” And she says, “No way!” We say, “Why not?” And she says, “Well, I don’t know if this thing is cool yet. You want me to risk inviting one of my friends? What are they going to think of me? If it sucks, they are going to think I suck, right?” And we say, “No, no, it’s going to be so much fun once you get the person in there; it’s a social product.” She looks at us, her face filled with doubt; you can see that this is a deal breaker.

Let me use your app. If it is good, I will ask my friends and followers to join voluntarily. Till then, I am happy at the back of the early access queue.

Dassault Rafale

I assume that these new planes will replace the old MIG 21 fleets among others, which has consumed so many lives of pilots in the past decade.

The Wikipedia page on the MRCA deal has a lot of history and context in which these jets are being purchased. Its worth a read.

As per news reports, 18 of these planes will be built and delivered, while the rest will be manufactured by the state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. Hopefully, the knowledge acquired from building these planes will help HAL in the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft, which has run in to rough weather countless times.

I was going through the history of Rafale, and it was interesting to see that this project was started in the early 80’s as a joint European fighter. France had disagreements over the requirements, and it broke away from others to build Rafale. The other European countries built the Eurofighter Typhoon.

To efficiently compete and lead in the years to come, the Indian government needs to heavily push higher institutions of great quality while also ensuring adequate financial support in the research projects.

The American F16 and F18 are more familiar to us by their many cameos in various Hollywood  movies, but we seldom see these other great jets. I found a promotional video for the Rafale on Youtube. Enjoy !

Photo Credit: Flickr/aereimilitariorg

We thought about whether we should do a music client for android. We put iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods. But I don’t see an advantage of putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I don’t want to make Android users happy.

Steve Jobs in his biography

I am near the end of reading Jobs’ biography and I am pretty confident that I didn’t see such hate for any technology other than Android. Its ironical how his own thoughts on Windows and Android sound the same.

Although it never came to my mind earlier,  Apple may at some time start thinking about becoming the content platform by letting Android and Windows Phone devices sync to iCloud. No one except Amazon in books, has a better digital content store than Apple.

A digital content store may become the entry point in to Apple’s ecosystem.

Although services like Kindle, Spotify and Netflix are quickly growing to challenge iTunes Store. It will be interesting to see how a post Jobs Apple takes up this challenge.