Omniscience

The Wall

2012-03-10T00:43:00.000+05:30

Pic Courtesy: rediff.com

Some of my friends still say that Rahul Dravid never got his due credit. To be fair with them, if Dravid would have born in a different era or a different country, he probably would have been known as the greatest cricketer of that era/country.

On the other hand, however, how many cricketers on the world have got any nicknames, and that too "The Wall"? I am sure most of the cricketing greats of this era and previous would love to trade that nickname with him.

The world is biased towards flashes of brilliance. It does not qualify patience and hard work as inspiring qualities. The ability to stay focused for years when others were taking away all the fame, is the one quality that makes Dravid the greatest of them all.

In the new age of T20s, the world will probably never see a Dravid again. But to the old timers, he will continue to remind that the greatest skill for success is consistency, and once the fame and aggression wears off, it is patience, focus, concentration and hard work that takes you to the next level.

I salute you Rahul Dravid, for being there all this while, and for giving hope to the rare breed of hard workers.

The true legend

2011-10-06T23:12:00.000+05:30

Steve,
If there's been one person I have idolized, it is you. Without you, living in this world would have been much worse.
Sadly, the world was only blessed with 56 years of your stay.

Steve Jobs, RIP. May the world recovers from your loss soon.

We are the champions

2011-04-03T01:52:00.000+05:30

It was in the 1992 world cup when I first saw cricket matches with any interest. Incidently, that was also Sachin's first appearance in a world cup for India. I was told we won it in 1983. When Pakistan won it in 1992, I thanked god that atleast we already had one to show for ourselves.

For 19 years, I couldn't understand what it feels to win the cup. Heck, I didn't even know if it feels anything. For 19 years, this other guy didn't know that feeling either. We abused him while feeling sorry for him when we got destroyed on a faithful eden garden pitch, and then when we came tantalizingly close but got brutally drubbed by a certain genius in yellow.

A dream of a billion cannot be fulfilled by one, it has to be fulfilled by eleven. This is the time when the individual brilliance of the 90s is complemented with the leadership and teamwork of 2011. This is a new India, and it can take on the world on its own. I salute the stars who have given us this belief. I salute you Sachin, I salute you Dhoni. I salute the Indian Cricket Team.

Yes, and now I know that there is a feeling when you win the cup. And I am happy that now he knows it too.
(Photo courtesy: cbc.ca)

Daring or Non Obedient?

2010-06-01T19:00:00.001+05:30

I wrote this (and the upcoming next) post while flying from Bangalore to Jaipur few days back.

Unka kaam hai bolna aur hamara kaam hai nahi sunna.

A fellow passenger doesn't switch off his cellphone during take off even after being specifically told by the flight attendent. On the other side, a small kid is sitting on an open tray table. His father(?) initially tries to get him to wear the seat belt, but when the kid doesn't agree, he gets busy with attending a phone call while his kid is sitting in a very unsafe position. All this during takeoff.

I wonder the paragliders and the sky divers in western countries would drive their cars without wearing a seat belt, even if their is no law regarding the same.

Being daring to get thrilled is one thing, unnecessary risk taking for sake of non-obedience is another. I am afraid a lot of Indians I know fall in the latter category.

Why Mafia Wars is more addictive than Farmville.

2010-05-31T21:37:00.000+05:30

I used to be a Farmville player, and after wasting quite a lot of my life precious hours on it (which could have so much more well spent with family/my startup and this blog), I was finally able to kick off this habit. However, in doing so, I got into another addiction and that too by Zynga -Mafia Wars. After wasting another set of precious hours, I now see how Mafia Wars has become the new addiction, and a more difficult one to cure.

Here are my reasons why I think Mafia Wars is a bigger addiction than Farmville.

Leveling up becomes pretty difficult after level 25. The max level player I saw in farmville was level 60 or so, and that was a paying player. On the other hand, I have completed more than 300 levels in mafia wars and I still can level up 4 times in a day.
The real gameplay is really just planting crops and harvesting. All other activities (such as harvesting trees and animals) yield zero/little experience and little money. The motivation is to get more and more different type of items, and most of these items have nothing more than decorative value. On the other hand, all the mafia wars activities yield exp/money/items, and items have attack/defense value useful for fights.
Maybe it was Zynga's brilliant move to monetize, but fuel limitation seriously hinders gameplay. That's Zynga's way of saying, this game is free only till level 25. No such apparent limitation in mafia wars.
You can setup Farmville to play only once every 24/48/72 hours (by planting appropiate crops), but you can't do the same for mafia wars. That's where mafia wars is dangerously addictive. Farmville addiction can be cured by slowing down the game and ultimately leaving it, mafia wars addiction is much more difficult to cure.
Farmville is slow to load. It took me almost 5 mins just to load the game everyday, and that was the primary reason why I stopped playing the game Just couldn't wait any longer.

Zygna has addressed some of these issues in recent times (after I stopped playing Farmville), such as useful buildings, one click harvesting, mystery gifts and giving out free fuel. But limited farmland and limited fuel capacity is still a major deterent.

So if mafia wars is so addictive, why is Farmville is no 1 game of the internet?
Here's why. The first time user to mafia wars will see all black screen with guns n illegal stuff, and all he needs to do is click "Do Job" again n again to gain exp. On the other hand, First time user to Farmville will see colorful plants on green soil and he has options to plant different crops. No prizes for guessing which one most users will like more.

You start liking Farmville immediately and slowly get bored of it. On the other hand, it takes you 10-20 level ups to start getting a hang of mafia wars (and getting used to it's graphics), and it starts getting addictive after you level up 50 times.

I invented the slow bouncer

2010-04-01T23:49:00.001+05:30

Long long time ago, I used to play a cricket game on my computer. It was a DOS game and was called Allan Border's Cricket.

Most of these cricket games were heavily tilted towards batsmen. There were limited options with the ball, and most of the time any player, like a typical indian, would simply put the game on auto-player mode while bowling and then play when it came to batting.

But I used to try bowling a lot (mainly because I was a better bowler as a kid than a batsmen). I saw that whatever I tried, it was really difficult to take wickets.

Then I noticed that these computer players would always leave the bouncers alone (it was the era of test cricket). So I would drop most balls short. Then I tried reducing the pace. I reduced and ... what I see ... the batsmen got BOWLED by the slow short pitch delivery (hehehahaha).

To some it might be discovering a bug in the game. To others it is innovation, out-thinking the computer (is that an oxymoron) and its physics laws by bowling out the batsmen with a slow bouncer.

I invented the slow bouncer.

20 years, 200 runs

2010-02-25T12:39:00.000+05:30

Dear Sachin,
I know I have been a crabby guy. For 20 years, all I have done is to complain. Sachin, why didn't you stay till the end and got those 17 runs? Why did you got out early when we needed to chase 360 runs for the world cup? Why do records like highest test score and highest test average belong to someone else? Why don't you play like your earlier days.

And I know you don't like that. All these 20 years you have been trying to keep me happy. Here, keep this Sharjah cup I got for you from Australia. Here are records for highest no of runs and centuries in both one days and tests. Here is the overseas win you wanted so badly. Here is me hitting Akhtar out of the park. And Shane Warne. And Olonga. And McGrath. And Walsh and Ambrose. And Akram and Waqar. Dude, I am trying hard for the world cup. Just wait.

I was 11 when I started watching cricket. You were 18. I don't even remember how quickly you became the synonym of cricket for me and for everyone else in India. I couldn't even realize that cricket is a team sport, not an individual one. Yes I liked Azhar, Jadeja, then I liked Ganguly, Dravid and then Sehwag, Dhoni. But truly speaking, I switched on the TV to watch you, and switched it off the moment you got out. When my mood is so much governed by how you play, I am bound to get crabby when you get out.

But from today I'll stop complaining. Today you wiped out which was probably our biggest shame, and coverted it to our proudest moment that's gonna stay for a long time. You were the one who stopped Anwar from getting a double hundred that day years back, and today you finally put an end to that pinching that every Indian Cricket Fan has been feeling in their hearts for past 13 years.

Congratulations on getting a double hundred Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, and Thank You very much.
(Photo courtesy: R@VITH)

Sanjay Goel resides on goelsanjay.com

2010-02-02T13:46:00.001+05:30

Its been quite some time since I registered domain http://www.goelsanjay.com. And even though moving blogger to your custom domain is only a 10 mins job, I have been lazy enough to not spare those 10 mins.
Anyways, here is my first post on the new domain. All the existing posts gets redirected automatically and the rss feed works too.
Great.

One small poll. Which domain is better?

goelsanjay.com or
sanjaygoel.name

I have registered both. Please mark your preference in the comments.

The next step would be to actually write a post, something I haven't done in 3 months. Its high time to do so, expect a post soon.

Why interviews are so tough?

2009-10-29T00:19:00.003+05:30

I often hear this - The interview was as if the company wanted me to build a spaceship, and now all the work I am doing is nowhere better than data entry.
Why do companies take such tough interviews during hiring and reject so many candidates when quite a lot of them are qualified to do the work they offer? Being on the other side of the table for quite sometime now, here is my point to view.

The World is full of boring/routine work - Vikas said that in his post Good Work Bad Work, and I couldn't agree more. Call it 80-20 rule, 90-10 or 99-1, challenging work is hard to come by.

Smart people take challenge in doing the boring work in a smart way - Regular people will do manual testing of their code, Smart ones would write automated testing code, Smart and experienced would know when to do manual testing and when to automate. Companies want smart people because they save their own time and teach the world to do boring stuff in a faster way.

Only smart people can solve difficult problems - So you have been doing all this boring work in your project. The project is deployed now. Suddenly the system has started failing consistently. Who is going to dig into the issue and solve it? The IT industry is different from most traditional industries in one fundamental way. Here, there are problems which average people cannot solve in their lifetimes but a smart one can solve in 10 mins. Smart people are troubleshooters. Companies need troubleshooters.

Apart from these, I believe that there is also another important reason related to human psychology. If the interview weren't tough, the candidate would feel it was too easy to enter the organization. During my job career, I took the toughness of the interview as an indication of what kind of peers I would have, and how good the company is in general. And the companies where I got in too easy were never the best places for me to work.

Some tips for a tough interview:
- Open ended questions are asked to judge your thinking. So Think, Think and Think out of the box. If you give a non-stupid answer that the interviewer has never heard before, thats a big bonus. Giving multiple solutions is also a good idea.
- Be prepared to write code on paper. Writing code really means psuedo code, don't worry about the syntax.
- Every interviewer has his own way of judging candidates, so don't panic. I used to ask only 2 questions to a candidate and never expected to get full and complete answer.

Which Payment Gateway to use in India?

2009-08-31T23:49:00.008+05:30

Every internet startup, sooner or later, faces this question - How do I charge money from my customer online? And there comes the ultimate question of which internet payment gateway to use on your website. This is a tricky question particularly in the Indian context, as payment gateways available in India do not come cheap and can have issues with reliability as well.

We were also faced with this ultimate question for mustseeindia.com, and we did our research.

There are 2 types of players in this field, one is a 3rd party service like ccavenue, ebs etc which ties up with many banks, and other is the bank itself providing its own payment gateway (like ICICI payseal). Broadly they are different in the following ways:

Both players accept all type of Mastercard and Visa credit cards. 3rd party players typically have more options than banks in terms of debit card acceptance, net banking options and other payments modes like cash card.
Banks are for high volume players. They have lower TDR (the % money they keep per transaction) plans and relatively lower setup fees than 3rd party providers, but if you have low volumes, they would turn out to be expensive.
3rd party players have plans as cheap as Rs 5,000 setup fee, but the TDRs can go as high as 7%. They would never go below a TDR of 2.5% approx, which means that at higher volumes, you would need to switch to a bank to get a TDR below 2.5%
Banks need lots and lots of paperwork, and integration time is usually more than 2 weeks. 3rd party players typically have lesser requirements.

Here is my individual assessment of the players I contacted:

Paypal : I am starting with this as most people suggest it on internet. Biggest issue with paypal is that it doesn't support transactions in Indian Currency, and hence it adds a currency conversion fee on the credit card. Also, I feel that asking an indian consumer to pay in dollars would turn him away just because of the psychological impact.
CCAvenue : The biggest 3rd party player in India. Offers variety of payment options which no other player come even close. Heard that it is quite reliable too. They are also the most expensive in the industry. They don't offer any custom plan other than the ones mentioned on their site, and they don't negotiate either (atleast with small players)
EBS : Probably the second best player after ccavenue. The plans are cheaper compared to most payment gateways. They were very responsive when I dropped my phone no on their site and offered me multiple custom plans as well as some discounts. Somehow I didn't find too many existing clients for this.
ICICI Payseal : They are probably the only bank who offer to small enterprises as well. If you are willing to spend in excess of Rs 25,000 in setup fees than you would get a better deal here than any 3rd party player. However, 2 issues to note specific to them: Technology reqt of java in integrating their gateway and issues with downtime. I personally noticed their gateway being down for several hours on irctc as well as pvrcinemas recently.
Times of Money Direcpay : A relatively newer player in the market. One of its clients told me that they still face a few technical issues here and there. They responded pretty late when I dropped my contact no on their site and offered prices similar or higher than EBS.
We tried contacting to Citibank(Billdesk) but they didn't respond. We didn't talk to HDFC at all as we didn't get good reviews for them.

The final two we shortlist out of these for us were EBS and ICICI. Of these, we decided to go to EBS, because:

ICICI Payseal had technology dependency on Java. When discussed, they offered another gateway with no such limitation called Nix. But I couldn't find any documentation on that.
I believe that EBS should be more reliable than ICICI in terms of higher speed and lower downtime.
EBS offers more payment options than ICICI, though the difference is not that great for this to be the sole reason.
With EBS, even the plans with low setup costs like their silver plan has reasonable TDR for a small business. Once our volumes are high, we can upgrade to a better plan.

Wedding, Honeymoon ... and back to Business

2009-07-31T14:58:00.006+05:30

The long vacation is over. It actually got over some 12 days ago, but getting back to the business keeps you busy enough to stay away from blog.

Ankita is now an integral part of Goel Family. And I thank everyone who was there to witness it. You can find few selected pics of our wedding here.

Keeping in line with the message of mustseeindia.com, We went to Kashmir for our honeymoon. I would find some time later on to write a full post on how great a place it was and how much fun we had. For now, I'll just let the pictures do the talking.

Gulmarg

The remaining photos are here.

With all these sweet memories, now I am back to Bangalore. And as Ankita joins me here tomorrow, we look forward to starting a new life together. Thank you all who have always been there for us. Let the good times keep on rolling.

D-Day Tomorrow

2009-06-30T15:29:00.001+05:30

Its almost time. Tomorrow is when me and Ankita would exchange vows to spend our rest of the lives together. And tomorrow is also the day when some 270 km away, my dear friend Vikas exchanges vows with Vinita to start their new life together.

Setting an example in extreme startup efficienby, the mustseeindia.com team has doubled its team within a span of 31 days ;-)

Here's the new team (with 2 potential hires ;-))

Wish both the couples luck as we start a new life tomorrow.

Two great startup articles

2009-05-25T01:16:00.001+05:30

Vikas Rana, Founder and CEO mustseeindia.com, has written a great article about our experiences at running a startup, focussing on what we did right. Do check it out here.

Prateek Dayal, Founder muziboo.com, writes about costs involved in a startup.

Both are great articles if you are a budding entrepreneur. Recommended read.

Busy busy ... and MSI's new look

2009-04-30T22:08:00.004+05:30

There has been times before when I couldn't blog for more than a month. However, I doubt there has been a more busier period in my almost 7 years of professional life.

It has been partly because of the 3 weeks vacation I took to get Engaged and to go on my last bachelor trip, a trip to the North East. I would hopefully get some time next month to write about my experiences there.

The other important reason which has kept all of us here at Must See India busy is the new look of mustseeindia.com. Our earlier theme had been around for some 8 months and we thought it was about time to get something new. We now have an orange theme throughout the site, which looks pretty pleasing to my eye. Also, the pages are much better organized now with one click access to all our new features - flight, train, bus and hotel search.

Please do comment with your valuable feedback for the same.

That is all the time I can spend on this blog right now. You can catch me on twitter for more frequent updates. And tomorrow is an important day in my fiancee's life, so I better get prepared for that ;-)

Losing Status

2009-03-25T02:05:00.001+05:30

This is that part of the life which everyone knows is coming and no one knows why. Well I did have some sadistic reasons to people who asked me why in the past, but now I would need permission to publish them. So much for freedom of speech :D

I have lost my bachelor status, as I am now officially engaged to Ankita.

Engagement Pics

Bobby, PK, Lapy, Mama, Lalka, Sid A, Karan, Gaurav, Aman and Priyanka - thanks for coming. You are the best. Hope you all and everyone else would be there for the moral support on D-Day.

25 Random Things about me

2009-02-17T20:45:00.003+05:30

I recently wrote a list of 25 things about me on facebook. Reproducing the same here:

I would be surprised if I am able to write 25 things about myself.
My college nickname Shakti went on to become my alter ego.
I am not a geek in the true sense. I am an entrepreneurial geek. And I know less than most people think I know.
I have reverse aged. Most things that people do in college, I did after it. And I still feel around 5 years older than I actually am.
I am one of the earliest adopters of most web 2.0 services you see today. Gmail, Orkut, delicious, flickr etc
I started blogging in 2004 out of boredom at work. It is one of the best things I have done and continuing.
I discovered my fascination for amateur photography during my Kashmir trip.
I started my first entrepreneur venture mustseeindia.com last year.
I am a risk taker in general and I love adventure sports. I have done rafting, skiing, paragliding. I wish to do sky diving.
I am one hell of a procrastinator.
I am a good teacher. I wish to teach a class just for fun.
I love snow and the Himalayas.
My first kiss was on my bday. My first breakup was on my bday too.
I changed so much during college that a college senior who saw me after 2 years couldn't recognize me.
Quite a few of my friends take my advice in their personal matters.
Biggest compliment I ever got was - It would be really difficult to find a guy who would say bad things about Sanjay.
My only ever purchase of Internet services (except for web hosting for my company) is buying storage on Picasa for storing photos.
Given enough time, I am a good judge of people. I used to do MBTI personality test on willing friends.
I used to have serious aversion to girls till end of college. Now, few of my best friends are girls.
I love gadgets. I used to be a mobile phone freak too until I bought the iPhone. I have become totally uninterested in other phones ever since.
I love music (even though that seems like a cliche). I own a pair of bose headphones for the same.
I am a bad bad singer but I really like to sing. That made me the most popular cacophonist during college.
I have been decent in sports. My biggest achievement in sports is winning a silver medal for my hostel in Volleyball.
I was the surprise Carrom Champion in my final year at college. It was incidently my debut at the championship. I also loved the Munnabhai MBBS carrom sequence, the only place ever where carrom has been glorified.
I have surprised myself. Wrote 25 items and still can think of a few more to write.

Which Web Hosting should I take?

2009-01-20T07:31:00.002+05:30

Thats the most frequent query that I see in most startup forums. No wonder it is, as setting up a domain is the first thing that any tech startup needs to tackle. Hence I decided to write a post on this, giving my answers. This post will help you with the following:

Registering a domain.
Understanding different types of web hosting.
Setting up email

Registering the Domain
While many hosting providers provide free domains, I believe it is always better to buy your primary domain individually rather than tied to any hosting plan. That ways even if you have to switch your hosting provider anytime, you need not worry about the domain. And with domains costing around $10/year, this is a pretty cheap investment.
There is not much of customer service needed from any Domain Registrar, so I simply looked for the cheapest I could find and registered the domains I needed. I used www.domainsearchindia.com, and while the website looks unprofessional and I had to call them to get things done, it got the job done at pretty much the cheapest prices I have seen so far. Lots of registrars would offer you Email Forwarding or Managed DNS hosting services, but you would not need them. The only thing you need after buying the domain name is an ability to change its nameserver to point to your hosting provider, and that comes for free.

Web Hosting
Web Hosting is a different beast. Here you need reliable servers, high uptime, good customer service and cheap prices on top of that. My first advice is to look for hosting in US. 2 reasons for that - first, bandwidth is cheaper in US and hence you can find a cheaper deal. Second, in general the reliability of US hosting providers and their customer care is better than the Indian ones.
There are 3 kinds of hosting - Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers.

Shared Hosting - The cheapest option available and is around $5-10 per month. Basically the server hardware on which your website would reside would also have 400-500 other websites hosted. Such a setup is in general used for hosting blogs or simple sites with low traffic. The hosting provider would offer huge bandwidth and harddisk, however there would be no promises on website loading speed. You can start with this for initial testing as well as till your traffic is low. A lot of people recommend Dreamhost for this. We used Lunarpages, and their service wasn't all that great but it was kind of okay. One piece of advice - look for SSH access. The web admin interface they provide isn't meant for techies.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting - The server hardware is sliced into 4-5 virtual servers using a virtualization software. So effectively you have your own machine with root access. Internally all the slices still use the same hardware but there are some gurantees on your share of CPU and memory. My friend Prateek suggested an excellent VPS hosting provider VpsFarm. Check out his blog post on why he recommends it. This type of hosting costs around $40 per month and works of medium traffic. A lot of people recommend buying multiple VPS slices for horizontal scaling as your traffic grows.

Dedicated Hosting - You own the whole server hardware. Costs start around $160. We have been using SoftLayer and have been pretty satisfied with that. We moved directly from Shared hosting to Dedicated hosting, primarily because I didn't know abt VPS hosting at that time. My website on Indian Tourism serves quite a lot of static content and VPS may have worked out well for us.

Another advice - Most US sites give out discount coupons/special offers from time to time. Do look out for offers and you may be able to get a good deal.

Setting up Email
Use Google Apps for your domain. Thats free and simplest way to setup your own email@domain-name. You would need to put some CNAME records and MX records in the DNS entries of the Web Hosting provider. If you are on shared hosting, you would need to ask the customer support to do the same for you.

This should solve some of the basic pains of setting up your own domain. One thing to notice is that cost of initial setup is pretty low. A domain name with shared hosting would set you back around Rs. 3000 for an year. That would give you enough time to test your new idea :-)

Upgrading iPhone from 1.1.4 to 2.2

2009-01-09T04:26:00.001+05:30

It has been quite some time since version 2.0 was released for iPhone 2G. Even though I thought of upgrading many times before, I couldn't due to following reasons:

The sites I used for unlocking 1.x versions didn't provide any info for 2.x, and I didn't feel like googling.
I wasn't sure whether my data could be backed up.
While info on unlocking a fresh iPhone was available, I couldn't really find anything on upgrade.
Most tools I found were Mac based.

Now that I did put enough time on google on this and successfully upgraded, here is how I did it:

Before starting, this article is strictly for iPhone 2G (i.e. the first phone Apple launched) using Windows.
All your data would be restored to the phone after the upgrade, so you need not worry about losing anything.
The process is applicable on both upgrading and setting up a fresh iPhone.
This would both jailbreak and unlock the iPhone. If you don't know what jailbreaking is, you need not worry.
Standard Disclaimer: Unlocking the iPhone voids its warranty. If you don't want that, don't do it. Of course, if you have the 2G iphone in India then its useless without unlocking.

What didn't work - This tutorial using WinPwn. Probably because I missed a few instructions. In any case, WinPwn doesn't 2.2 as of now.

What worked - This tutorial using QuickPwn. Time needed - 25 mins.

Why should you upgrade? iPhone Apps. Check out all the new apps that are available in iTunes store. I have already installed more than 20 (all free) and they greatly enhance the ability of iPhone.

Trouble Shooting (some steps I tried while giving phone support to friends who had issues upgrading)

Check that the restore file you downloaded is not corrupt. You can do it by finding the md5sum of the file. It should be 3603b5d9536cd0b269261cab406a7c38. To find out the md5sum, download from here.

Life, Recession and some Nostalgia

2009-01-08T03:12:00.000+05:30

Sometime around this last year, I was patting my team members on the back. We had collectively achieved what for me was "the biggest achievement of my career".

Some 10 months earlier, my CEO had felt the need to revamp one of our offerings. It was a web application in the Education vertical of Lead Generation market, and it had gone pretty big contributing to almost a third of company's revenues. But the product was a two tier jsp/servlet/mysql architecture with little reporting features. We wanted to take this to the next level - scalable and flexible architecture, easier maintenance, much higher data gathering and lots of reporting, optimization and mining on top of that. Me and a colleague of mine were entrusted with this project.

This was exactly the kind of technical challenge I was looking for. Working on the product from scratch, right from reqts to design to coding to testing/deployment, everything was in my hands. And as I realizes later on, such challenges are not just "technical"
10 months is a long time. Its the time when confidences get shaken. Its the time when the entire business team gets changed. And its also the time when a team to 2 grows to team of 10. And when a guy moves from Senior Software Engr -> Tech Lead -> Tech Architect.

It was a great Dec. There are night outs everyday. Everyone in the team was highly motivated. Typical schedule was working till 11 and then having dinner together. We were determined to get our baby to replace the old boy by January. And we did it. I was so proud of my team. I still am.

Sadly, not many are in the company to witness the 1st birthday of the child. The success of the product gave me enough confidence to move towards my next dream, my entrepreneur venture. But some of the others were not as lucky. I never really felt that recession would cause laying off in Indian companies, but it did happen last month and quite a few of my colleagues were unfortunate to be part of it.

Life does not always have a happy ending, but that does not reduce the flavour of the proceedings. The time we all worked together was great, and I would always be proud of working with such a great team. And thank you everyone for making my dream a reality.

AVG Antivirus 8 doesn't update

2008-12-01T03:30:00.001+05:30

I recently upgraded my AVG 7.5 to 8. I have been using and recommending AVG for home users since a long time now primarily due to two reasons:

It is free.
All major antivirus solutions are trying to become all-in-ones with integrated firewall, anti-spyware etc etc. While this is beginner friendly, it also makes them pretty resource hungry. While Avg Pro is in the same race, I still see Avg free as much lighter on resources.

Having said that, I also feel that an average Avg user needs to be computer literate.

I didn't face any issues with AVG 7.5 other than the update server being down sometimes. However, I ran into an issue as soon as I installed AVG 8. After a few auto-updates that went fine, it suddenly stopped updating, giving an error message - "Invalid CTF file". At first the AVG update server was down, but this went for longer than I would expect the server to be down.

I googled around a bit and found this. The solution was straight-forward

Goto C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\avg8\update\download
Delete the 2 .ctf files there.

And it worked. No issues with AVG 8 after that. However, I am pretty surprised by that AVG has not understood the gravity of the situation and have failed to provide an automatic patch. I agree that this is a free product, but how do you expect your free users to convert to pro if your free product will fail to provide the security that it promises. Issues like these can single-handedly kill a product.

Farewell letter to Sourav Ganguly

2008-11-12T06:57:00.005+05:30

Dear Sourav

I was in class Xth when I first heard about you. My friend told me that these matches would be telecasted in some new channel ESPN, which I cable provider didn't provide. I wasn't too keen anyways. Next day he told me that you hit a century on Lords. Bahut hi beautiful khel raha tha yaar, aur off side main to amazing hi maar raha tha.

Then came Toronto, the Sahara Cup. You won the man of the match with your batting. Sachin, who was captain then, said - We have a secret weapon, and he did it for us. Next match, small target for Pakistan. They were doing well. Suddenly you came and took 5 wkts. We won and you won the man of the match again. Sachin - As I said we have a secret weapon, and he can bowl too. Another match, another man of the match. and then another one. Sachin was running out of words. All he said was - Well, our secret weapon is not longer secret. And you became the God of offside.

Then I went to college. you and Sachin became the most successful opening pair for India. And you would come at no 6 in tests, inevitably hitting a century playing with tailenders. And inevitably you would come down the track and hit the ball for a six on mid on. Sixes from Indian Batsmen were a rarity those days. We actually believed that Rahul Dravid cannot hit a ball for six as he doesn't have enough power. This and the Straight Drive six from Sachin were the treats that we would watch a match for. And what happened in that faithful match with Sri Lanka Sourav. You just kept on coming down the track on Murali and hitting him for a six. A score of 183 to break the age old Indian record by Kapil Dev. I haven't seen anything like that before. And I thought, what are you doing Sachin, this record should belong to you. And he heard me too. In the hindsight, Sachin and Sourav with #1 and #2 best individual scores for India make perfect sense.

Me and my friend used to just read statistics on cricinfo as a pastime. We found out, not surprising though, and that you have taken less matches to cross each 1000 runs landmark. I remember this link, At that time there used to be only 2 names there, and your name on the top (and only one name in the next list).

An injury to Ajay Jadeja and you were given captaincy for one ODI which we won. Then among some match fixing controversies and a ban on Jadeja, you became the captain. That was the time when we realized that your true greatness was more than batting. You became the most aggressive Indian Captain ever. Statements by the Steve Waughs would now get matching answers. You became the center of Indian Cricket, as many critics and there were fans. Some would say you couldn't play on the leg side. Others would say you can't play bouncers. But we the college youngsters just loved your attitude. You made us believe that we can be more than just tigers at home. And forget cricket, you taught us aggression, and the confidence to take on the world.

It was you under which we witness the most historic wins. That Very Very Special Eden Gardens Test, that Natwest Final where you took of the ur shirt. In there anyway one can forget them. Then there was the overseas victory in England. And it didn't come easy. You took the brave decision to bat first on a testing pitch, then Dravid passed that test with flying colors to hit a century on day 1. Then Sachin and you took over and just murdered the English bowlers. I remember the umpire offered you guys light and you didn't take it. Instead, both of you scored 83 runs in the next 10 overs that we bowled. The first time when the God, the Wall and the Prince all hit centuries in the same test, and that too an overseas one. We had to win that one.

Then people started questioning your batting. We thought its just a lean patch and will be fine as long as you are leading well. Then came the World Cup. Suddenly the pacers who used to be the weakness of the team became match winners. Suddenly the fielding improved. Suddenly there were weird things happening like Team Huddles. Before the Pakistan match, you said We just need to win every match. And you did. Except Australia. But you did establish India as the second best team after all.

But what happened then Sourav. That lean patch would simply not end. Its not that we didn't wait. 3 years is a long long time. Its a long time when everytime you would watch a match hoping to see that flair again that Sourav was known for, and all you would get a yet another disappointment along with everyone else saying bad words for you. You got a century in Australia and you almost made it a miserable last series for Steve Waugh. But we wanted more than that. You only taught us aggression. And aggression also means dropping a senior player mercilessly if its good for cricket. But you seeemed to forget your own principles. And one day you were out. I thought it was probably good for you. But I felt bad the way media used it. But that was is their business, isn't it.

It indeed was good for you as you fought back. You taught us yet again on what to do in unfavorable circumstances. You fought and fought hard. You won back ur place. And you proved yet again that you deserve a much better exit than what you got earlier.

Cricket ceased to be the same and so did life 6 years after college. There would not switching off the TV when Sachin would get out. There would not be a sense of confidence that one need not worry as long Dravid in on the crease. And there would not be leader like Sourav who would just not take sh*t from anybody.

You can never forget heroes that you grow up with. And You are one of those. Farewell Sourav, I salute you, as much for being in the game as for leaving it.

Update: This post is on BlogBharti

Photo Courtesy: rediff.com, welovesourav.com

Paragliding in Manali

2008-10-26T03:54:00.010+05:30

What a fantastic vacation it was. I have always had a knack for adventure sports and Paragliding was loads of fun as well as satisfaction to learn something new. Five of us went together to do a course on Paragliding at Solang close to Manali.

Continuing the tradition of live blogging in Ladakh, I wrote most of the blog during the vacation itself, and this time it was much easier to type on my iPhone.

10-10 8:30 PM

Learning from the mistakes of Ladakh Trip, we booked a HPRTC Volvo Coach well in advance. In the bus right now and it looks pretty good. This is the last official bus to manali. However, lots of private deluxe and sleeper buses seem to be available.

11-10 11:30 AM

Reached manali in exactly 15 hours. Gonna be leaving for Solang Valley(thats where the paragliding happens) immediately via a taxi. He has agreed for 400 bucks.

11-10 10:00 PM

Today has been all about resting. While having lunch at our hotel, we spotted some people doing paragliding and clicked photos.

First View

Had a walk in the evening to the paragliding centre. There is Horse Riding, Zorbing and a ride in an all terrain vehicle. Prices are exorbitant and nothing other than Paragliding seemed interesting.

Zorbing

12-10 3:00PM

Today is our first day at paragliding. Our instructor is Mr. Anil. The first session was pretty good. Paragliding is best during summers. Heated surface generates thermals needed for high flying. Also the wind needs to be continuously belly up.

The basic concept of paragliding is "take the glider and run". As Rishi Kapoor said in Namastey London - ball phad, aur saand ki tarah bhaag.

Run hard

4:30PM

We couldn't do any paragliding in the afternoon as the tail wind started instead of belly up. Need to start early tomorrow.
6:30PM

We met Mr. Bhagat, who is the organizer here. Very nice guy. He would be giving us lift to Manali. On the way, he showed us this great place for pizza and beer. Its called Himalayan sports club and its open only on Sundays. After a good pizza, we are off to manali.

With Bhagatji

13-10 8:00PM

A very satisfying day at Paragliding. The trainers today were sikander and dharmender, two young and enthusiast chaps. During the last practice of the day, I was actually able to take off. Shobhit also reached pretty close to taking off. One bad thing that happened was that Shitiz got injured during the start of the day. Though the injury is minor, it prevented him from any practice today. We came back at 4, rested and then left for Vashisht Springs and manali at 6.
10:00 PM

We had a bath in the hot spring of Vashisht Temple. The water was pretty hot. It was just great. Had dinner and came back.

Come on Fight

14-10 4:00 PM - Rest Day.

We decided to take a day off from paragliding as everyone was pretty tired. Shitiz injury is not yet healed. It came out to be a good decision as it started raining around 11AM, which meant we could anyways not paraglide today. We decided to visit Manikaran to visit the gurudwara and the hot water springs there. Manikaran is quite a long drive from solang. The route is solang -> manali -> kullu -> manikaran. Took us 2.5 hrs to reach there. We visited the gurudwara and had langar. Then we saw the hot water springs and the shiva temple of Manikaran. The water was boiling hot. Even the temple surface was pretty hot due to the water.

Hot Springs

8:00PM

We went to Kullu to see the dussehra mela. Kullu Dussehra is famous and is celebrated over 7 days here. Various god statues from nearby villages are brought over to kullu where the kullu god is brought by the king of kullu. We reached just in time to see the procession of the gods.

Kullu Dev

Now we are going to manali to have dinner.

15-10 11:30 PM

Another rest day, a forced one. We started at 10 in the morning in overcast conditions. Barely did 3 flights when it started raining. Kept on raining throughtout the day. We have been playing dumb charades of Hindi songs since yesterday and we continued that. We have pretty much guessed every song of the world :D Sleeping and playing dumb charades has been the order of the day.

16-10 1:00PM

It hasn't stopped raining yet. Shobhit is not too happy. He wants to fly. But it seems like our paragliding dreams are over. It has snowed a lot at Rohtang and the roads are blocked. There is snowfall in Marhi too, which is normally the location for medium flying (i.e. people paraglide from Marhi to Solang). High Flying is from Rohtang to Solang, take around 45 mins.

We went to Manali in the morning to take Shitiz to a local doctor to fix the bone joint of his knee.
We would be going to Marhi today to enjoy the snow.

11:00PM

Marhi was fantastic. I remember stopping at this place when we went to Ladakh. This time around it was covered with snow. Snowfall was going on when we reached, and we played in the snow for a while. Took some nice photos as well. The weather got cleared by the time we came back which gave us hopes of paragliding for tomorrow.

The Five Samurai

White all around

Marhi Panorama

At 11 in the night, I came out to photograph the snow covered mountains under the moonlight. Whatever photography knowledge I have gained so far got me this photo which I would call my best photo so far.

Mountain in Moonlight

17-10 7:00PM

Beautiful sunny day. Paragliding at last. Started at 10 today. Shitiz is still not fit and Kirti got unwell due to the snow last night. So its gonna be just me, shobhit and shubra. We had quite a few flights today. Notice that I used the word flights and not trial :-) we learned a lot today and got lifted quite a bit in our flights. We paraglided till around 2 after which the tail wind started.

11:00 PM

We got tickets for Volvo coach back to Delhi for tomorrow at 5:30PM. Tomorrow is going to be our last day here and at Paragliding. We plan to paraglide till around 12PM and also get a tandem flight from medium height if possible.

18-10 6:00PM

Another very satisfying day at Paragliding. This also concludes a very satisfying paragliding beginner's course. Shobhit and me both got some great flights, and I was able to reach the highest point for a beginner to take off from, in the last flight of the day.

Me Flying

Shobhit Flying

I finished the flight, took off the harness and helmet and went over to Sikander. As soon as he sees me, he says Aap Pitching theek se control nahi kar rahe hai, this is dangerous ... not really realizing that I am done for the season. That has been the story of the two coaches, Sikander and Dharmender, very keen on teaching and very strict. Next time when I come over, I would like to continue the classes and scoldings from them.

With Dharmender and Sikander

Shubra and Shitiz did tandem flights too.

Shubhra Flying

Shitiz Flying

Now we are in the bus back to Delhi, ending a fantastic week. Next destination for me would be my hometown Jaipur, where I'll stay till Diwali. See ya and have a great Diwali.

Off to Manali

2008-10-09T03:25:00.005+05:30

Its been 3 good months in Bangalore. Its been fascinating working on Must See India and there has been great progress to keep the enthu going. For one, the traffic on Must See India has doubled in these 3 months! But the real motivation is the encouraging comments for travel enthusiasts that keep on flowing.

Other happenings in these 3 months have been Tennis, trip to Coonoor, two trips to Chennai and a rediscovered interest in photography. Traveling with some great photographers to Coonoor gave me motivation to get better pictures from my camera and I have been working towards learning the manual modes of my Canon Powershot S3 IS. The best of the pictures that I have taken all go in this Must See Photo Album.

After a real busy past 2 weeks, its time to take a break and do what I like the most - travel! Leaving for Delhi today, and then to Manali. The primary agenda is gonna be Paragliding at Solang Valley. And its gonna be a 5 day course where we should (hopefully) be able to paraglide all by ourselves.

So here I go, wishing everyone Happy Dusshera and a prosperous Diwali in this festive month.

Ideas are dime a dozen

2008-09-14T17:06:00.002+05:30

Most people in startups or planning to startup have now dispelled the notion that one needs to come up with a great unique idea to succeed. What I believe is more important is whether you are solving a real pain point of a real customer and can you execute your idea to perfection.

For those who are still living in the idea world, here are 30 ideas that ycombinator would like to fund.

6 years of software engineering

2008-08-19T03:24:00.003+05:30

This is probably going to be the shortest review so far. I have already talked about my new venture a while back. Life has not been the same ever since. I always thought of life as a series of challenges. You solve one, you get another. The level keeps on increasing. Its almost like playing a game. I am pretty satisfied with the way I completed the previous level, and what gives me extra satisfaction is the 2 statements my previous company's GM made when I was about to leave:

You have very high professional ethics, and such people succeed in the long run.
You have followed one of the most complete career paths in this company.

That level is over, and its time to play up the highest professional challenge.

On the personal side, life continues to be a roller coaster. I remember that long long time ago (before I even started this blog), I took an EQ (Emotional Quotient) test. In the results, they said that I fell into the same category as Albert Einstein did. Before I could feel proud, I read the next line which said - Albert Einstein had 3 broken marriages.