My Blog, 2.0

I'm in the process of upgrading this blog. I'll move to my own domain, and most likely Wordpress, although I'm looking at Drupal and Joomla as well. Let me know what your experience has been with these CMS tools.

Posts will be few and far in between, so please bear with me and hang in there. I'm working hard to find a good theme and look and feel so you folks have a better experience.

This is the time to make your wishlist. Drop me a comment on what you'd like to see, or have me cover in this blog.

Google acquires Jaiku

Happened today, its likely that you have already read about it.

img courtesy: jaiku

Here's some FAQ&A on the deal and its implications.

Q: Why not Twitter?
A: Google probably thinks Twitter is overvalued (at USD 20 million). It is likely that they spent lesser on the Jaiku deal. Twitter recently closed a USD 5 million second round. And it is in Europe (read: ahead of the US on mobile technology adoption).

Q: But Twitter has more users, is more popular?
A: Sure, but Jaiku is more than just a micro-blogging or lifestreaming platform. It is an intelligent presence detection application, with their smart address book feature. Google is acquiring technology again, they can generate the user numbers, I suppose.

Q: Where does this all fit in the biG picture?
A: The New York Times reported yesterday that Google phone project is a mobile software project. So whether the Google offering competes with Microsoft (Windows Mobile) or Apple (iPhone) remains to be seen, but in the light of this, the Jaiku acquisition seems to make sense. A mobile software (platform, most likely) + mobile technology from Jaiku + mobile social network Zingku to promote it. All the right conditions for Google to continue to govern your life.

Q: Google, Social Networking? Remember Orkut, Dodgeball? Why will they take on Facebook and MySpace?
A: Because they are Google. Their social networking attempts have not taken off well - at least in the US - but there are rumors that there may be a third life (or should it be second, second life?) in the wings. Although Jaiku fits in nicely with their mobile strategy, its lifestreaming features is a ammunition for any Social Networking War (what an Oxymoron!) that it may be gearing up for.

Afterthought: MS should really buy that stake in Facebook.

What do you think?

Sowmya Karmali on Agile Development

... that was what the title said. Yesterday, I had a talk at the .NET User Group in Monrovia on Agile Development. It was a 90 min session excluding the break, thats a long time for someone to be talking. Thanks to the great audience, it was a breeze. My slides:

Part I: the ten commandments for an agile developer


Part II: Agile tools for .NET Development


Here are some interesting points raised by the audience. I'd like to see your opinion too.

(On TDD) What if you are enhancing or maintaining an existing version of a product that doesn't have test cases written? How do you convince management that you need that extra time to write those test cases?

(On build scripts) If your testing required some data in the database, how do you include that into your build script?

(On estimation) How do you estimate for an agile project? Especially when you say you aren't going to freeze your requirements in the first place.

(On FDD & Iteration planning) If you have a product that requires some meta data modeling, how do you plan to do it iteratively? You need to complete the meta model in order to have a complete design.

There were all the usual elements of a geek meetup: pizza, coke, books, oversized t-shirts...I'm glad some things don't change.

My talk on Agile Development

On 19 September, I'm going to deliver a talk on Agile development and Agile .NET tools at the San Gabriel Valley .NET user group meeting. Here's a link to the details. (Note: this link will go bad in about a month's time -- you'll discover why when you click on it.)

The first part of the talk is based on my earlier blog post on the 10 Commandments for an Agile Developer.

If you or any of your friends are going to be around in around Los Angeles, do drop by for the pizza and coke ;).

My Web 2.0 Business Models presentation

I made this presentation at the Bangalore Barcamp 2 in Dec, 2006. I looked at the stats on slideshare.

2000+ views, favorited 12 times. I feel good.

This presentation is special for me because it made me break away from the "bullet point" way of creating slides and delivering talks. I realized - post fact- that I was more comfortable using the simple, freeform style in my slides. It makes me talk with more conviction. Here's to Zen.

Zoho, Offline

I didn't intend to follow up one Zoho post with another, but this is too good to pass up.

Zoho docs are now available offline - a feature its competitor, Google docs & spreadsheets has yet to offer. Available on Zoho Writer, for now. Zoho's solution, ironically, uses Google Gears in its implementation. I think using Google gears is a super idea for 2 reasons:
1. Shorter release cycle -- don't re-invent the wheel (or gear, in this case)
2. Google Gears' universal appeal. If and when Google docs is available offline, they're likely to base it on Gears too.

Although the documents aren't editable offline for now, I'm told that the feature is just around the corner.

Zoho Writer has got more slick as well. You can now comment on portions of documents, and have a discussion style document review.

Nice going, guys!

Deep Dive: Zoho Office Suite

Zoho has been on my favourite companies list for a while now. This is a long promised deep dive into its popular online productivity tool set, called Zoho Office Suite.

Zoho is a product from a Chennai-based company, AdventNet, whose other LoB is software services. The Zoho Office Suite has a range of products, from an online document creator (Zoho Writer) to a CRM Solution (Zoho CRM).
The products are targeted towards small businesses and individual users - a segment thats rising in number. Zoho now has over 300,000 registered users, (Compare: Twitter has 200,000 registered users) and this number is increasing at a tremendous rate (Twitter's growing faster, of course).

Whats really commendable is that Zoho's got there frugally.They operate with a "We do not want any Venture Capital" mentality - which translates thus

1. All the development happens out of Chennai (quite expected)
2. Most of the Marketing happens out of Chennai (really cool, when your primary market is the US)
3. Very focused Promotions (Ads on some A-list bloggers, sponsoring key conferences, blogger evangelism)
4. Virtually no sales organization

This is why they can give away some products for free :), for individuals.

I Like
I've used Zoho Writer (the word processor), Show (online presentation tool), Sheet (online spreadsheet) quite extensively. Featurewise, they do pack a lot of punch into the tools, and you can see some really smart AJAX at work. Like the drawing tools, for instance. Drag and Drop, Rotate, selecting a region full of drawing - all these are very neatly done. Not as full featured as MS Word or Open Office, but it is quite enough for "normal" usage. The fact that you can share & collaborate on the documents more than makes up for it. The right comparison to make is between Zoho and Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Featurewise they are neck to neck, but the Google brand drives more users its way.

You must try out Zoho Creator. Its an online application creator. Means, you can have a simple UI+DB kind of application created within minutes (Did someone say MS Access? Nyaah!). Say you want your own expense tracker or maintain a record of who's borrowed your books, Zoho Creator is the thing for you. It also has a built in workflow engine. Thats a power pack!

Zoho Notebook will remind you of MS One Note. Doesn't matter. Few people know about OneNote. Notebook is a great freeform scrapbook tool that helps you collect your pieces of research, take notes in a meeting, doodle -- do whatever you do with a physical notebook. Whats more, there's a Firefox plugin for Notebook. Lovely. Now you can take notes as you browse -- copy paste from a website and it will paste the URL too. How many of us need that? (I do, for sure.)

Zoho was the first Office 2.0 vendor to open up its APIs to its users. The way they categorized their APIs makes complete business sense, and I think is a lesson for us Software Architects & Designers: They have one API set to access the Data alone, and one set to access the editor services. Neat.

Zoho was also one of the first apps to integrate with Facebook, and was recently in TechCrunch's list of 10 Favourite Facebook Apps. I like these guys. They really have their eyes and ears open. Imagine the 20-somethings collaborating on their term papers within FaceBook.

I Want

• I wish they were more keyboard shortcuts. These aren't tough to do. Users are used to Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and other common shortcuts. It makes adoption so much easier.
• There are other features that require some loose ends to be tied up. (Why can't I change font size if I have clicked on a text area? Why do I have to explicitly select some text? Why can't I share my Slide Notes as well?)
• Zoho should market Show (the presentation tool) more agressively. There isnt a similar offering from Google, nor is there any clear leader in that space. Show could use better drawing capabilities, more slide layouts or templates. More third-party integration, in true Web 2.0 style. For example, I would like to share my Zoho presentations on SlideShare. Co-brand if you will, but allow the cross-pollination.
• Talking of integration, I'd like to see some amongst the different tools. For example: Zoho Chat integrated with Writer, Show and Sheet. That would be one productivity boost to people collaborating on a document. Another would be to integrate Notebook into Writer. You would imagine that the pieces of collected information within a notebook do get into more formal & structured documents. The users should be able to drag n drop or cut n paste from Notebook into Writer.
• Better graphics. Really. Most icons and images look old fashioned. For a consumer toolset like Zoho, the snazziness of the user interface is critical (Only SysAdmins don't care what the icons look like). Specially if you are going to compete with Google, 37Signals and the like, you have to provide a sleek looking user interface.
• Be a Salesforce + Google for SMBs. I mean, Zoho could create smart stacks of tools (packages, if you like) for business users - Office + Wiki + IM + CRM. Thats a very compelling offering, and no one in the market has it yet.

Zoho also has a Chat tool, Wiki, Meeting Organizer, Project Management and CRM tool, but I really haven't used those enough to talk about them in detail. Overall, a great product suite, something I would recommend you go play around with. Most of these are free for individual use. I'd love to know what you think.

The Harry Potter Mania Fossil

3 days to go. I can't wait to lay my hands on the last book. I have so many theories - as would anyone who's read the series so far - whether Sirius Black is really dead, Harry is a horcrux, what Aunt Petunia got to do with all this. It doesn't matter whether I am going to be proven right or wrong, its so much fun thinking about all the pieces of the story. Kids who will grow up to read Harry Potter would miss out on this fun. For instance, when my son (who's just over 1 yr) is old enough to read the book, he'll probably have a hard-bound boxed set, but the overall story will be well known. Readers like us have the pleasure (or otherwise, if you think) of ruminating over each part (i mean, each book), spewing out our own theories and reasoning, asking irrelevant questions with enthusiasm. In short, my son will probably read the Harry Potter series like I read the Lord of the Rings or the Hitchhikers Guide - where the intervals of suspense are shorter.
Reading the first 6 books after this one's out, knowing what is going to happen in the end is likely to be a completely different experience. Just try reading the Prisoner of Azkaban now that we know Peter Pettigrew helps Voldemort regain his powers. I'm going to miss the feeling of having so many unanswered questions.

Note to Self: Hyperlink all the terminology to the appropriate wikipedia pages.

Note to Reader: If you don't see a hyperlink, please look up the word on wikipedia.

At Code Camp, San Diego

Got bitten by the BarCamp bug again. I spent the last weekend at the Rock and Roll Code Camp at San Diego. This was one unconference that covered a lot of MS technologies. I got my fill of Silverlight, CardSpace, and some refresher/updates on WCF and WPF. I also saw an good demo of TeamCity. This is a build management tool (quite comprehensive) from Jetbrains, the same guys who make Idea, my favorite Java IDE.

My presentation on "The Ten Commandments for an Agile Developer", was based on a post I wrote earlier. My slides:





This was one unconference that made the speakers feel extra special. A speakers' room, bags and t-shirts as audience giveways, and even a speakers badge! I'm saving mine :), I've never seen it in an unconference before.

Barcamp Bangalore... never too late to write about it

This article on Barcamp Bangalore 3 appeared in the Hindu (an Indian newspaper), Bangalore Edition on 17 March, almost a month and a half after the actual event took place. That's me in the photograph, presenting my talk on Mifos. Barcamp Bangalore will happen once every quarter (just need a reason to gang up, talk geek and drink beer) - the next one is slated for July. Dates not finalized yet. I'm not going to be able to make it to BCBs for some time.

I relocated to Irvine, California earlier this month. Luckily for me, Barcamp San Diego is happening on the weekend of Jun 2/3. More details here. Drop me a note if you are going to be there.

Nike's 1st Cricket Ad (Lyrics here)

This is Nike's first cricket ad, first internationally (meaning, non US) made ad, and right on the money to capture the cricket crazy nation that is India. A small strip of space and a ball is all you need to get started.
Its a rather long ad, so they're dishing out a lot of moolah everytime they air this, but its got people's attention. For those not living in India, here's the video.



The song in the ad is a Konkani song, and a few people I know were looking for the lyrics of the song, so here goes. I grew up in Goa, so I understand a fair bit of Konkani.

Lyrics
[Literal translation (intended meaning)]

Rao, Patrao, Rao
[Wait, boss/partner, wait]
Khelu mhaka di muntao
[Let me play]
Khelu mhaka di na zaalyaar tuze photelle toklao
[If you don't let me play I will break your head (I'll chase you down)]

Kheluch amche osle
[Our game is like this only]
kenna-ch raunk nasle
[never waited (to think)]
Undeer-Maazraache khelu kosle
[like a cat and mouse game]
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
We didn't quite catch the lyrics at this line, can someone help?

Moraun dhoraun podaun sonkol
[fighting, pulling, falling]
Noseeb mhoje kosle
[my fate's caught in it]

Lyrics courtesy Aditya, Goan-to-the-core. (Will someone tell him to stop singing it all day?!)

At WikiCamp

Unconferences are bad for my body clock. I woke up early - on a Sunday, that too - to catch a flight to Chennai for the WikiCamp. When I reached Tidel Park (the venue), Jimmy Wales had started his talk on wikipedia, wikia. He clarified to all of us that Wikipedia was not running out of money as was reported. He'd meant that they had 4 months of money in the bank, and only if they didn't receive a cent in donations for 4 months running (which is highly unlikely) they would be in a crisis.

I met with some of the key Indian contributors to Wikipedia

• Bhadani, the Grand Old Indian of Wikipedia, is No. 45 in the list of worldwide contributors. This banker from Pondicherry humbles all of us.
• Ganesh K (is ganesh a bot or a human?),
• Sundar, the guy behind the Tamil wikipedia, and an admin on Wikipedia.
• Arun R and Atul Chitnis, contributors .

I spoke in the afternoon. My slides:



Atul Chitnis spoke about how to use a wiki as a website, using http://foss.in as an example. Very cool. Until then I didn't know that foss.in was a wiki site. Some clever scripting done.

In the afternoon, I moderated a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session that was hitherto unplanned. Hey, its an unconference, so all this works. We went through multiple rounds of reorganizing sessions till we had something that was agreeable to all. While we were doing it, we were the fancy of many a photographer.

Photo courtesy: Siddhi

So, back to the BoF. We got all the guys I mentioned above plus Jimmy Wales on a panel, and shot questions at them.

Photo Courtesy: Arvind

Ashwin was liveblogging the BoF until (he and) his laptop ran out of battery. There were some guys who were doing a documentary on wikis, and they captured the whole discussion. I'll link to them as soon as I can get their info.

Moot points

1. Kiruba was formally dressed (he had to, he was the organizer)
2. Someone actually asked Jimmy Wales "So, when is Wikipedia going to list on NASDAQ?". Jimmy had the patience and grace to answer it. (No, I'm not going into the lengthy explanation here.)
3. Atul Chitnis got pelted with squeeze balls for exceeding his talk-time to provide the media a "story" (read his comment below). Geeks have bad aim -- only 2 of them hit their target, and Atul is hard to miss. No wonder software projects have so many bugs.
4. Red Bull was one of the sponsors, so we all had wings in the afternoon
5. Chennai was cooler than Bangalore that day.
   

More photos from Arun and Vinod. Search flickr for "wikicamp" to get the whole lot.

More coverage on this event in the Blogosphere (comment or contact me to add your link here)
Arvind
Ashwin
Prathul
Himanshu

Veni, Vedi, Wiki(Camp)

The first-of-its-kind-in-India gathering of Wiki-people is happening in Tidel Park, Chennai on 25th February. If you like/use/want to know about Wikis, then be sure to attend WikiCamp. From the list of topics I see, its all about the guts, the gashes, the gore and glory of using Wikis.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is going to be there. It is an unconference, so speak up and participate. Let me know if anyone of you reading this is also going to be there, will be glad to catch up. See you on Sunday.

If you cannot make it for some reason, you can come back here and read about it for sure.

How-to: Create a dual boot laptop with Ubuntu and Windows XP

A few months ago, I configured my laptop to dual boot into Windows and Ubuntu. This post is dedicated to spreading the Ubuntu love :), and comes at the advice of a friend.

System Configuration
My laptop is a Dell Latitude D620, and came pre-installed with Windows XP Professional (+SP2). I also had a Ubuntu 6.10 CD (Edgy Eft) (I'd previously ordered it). You can alternately download it and burn an ISO. Note: Ubuntu comes with GNOME desktop, if you want KDE, you should download kubuntu.

Create the partitions
Mine was a fresh Windows install (the laptop was new), but if your's isn't, you should run defrag to free up any disk space before creating any partitions.

Using the Windows XP administration tool, I created 4 (roughly equal) partitions on my 80GB HDD: 1 for the Windows OS install, 2 NTFS partitions for my data and Windows programs, and 1 "blank" (unallocated) partition, for Ubuntu.

Install Ubuntu
First, I changed my BIOS boot sequence to boot from the CD drive before the HDD. Then inserted the Ubuntu CD, and booted into Ubuntu. I chose the Install Ubuntu option, and followed the steps in the wizard. At some point, the installation prompted me to create my partitions. I chose to "Manually edit partition table" and found my 4 partitions listed there.
I left the windows partitions as is - they show up as as sda* (*=1,2,3 depending on how many Windows partitions are there). Of the unallocated space, I created two partitions.
1. Linux swap, of 2GB (rule of thumb says that your swap partition should be about twice your RAM)
2. Linux (OS) partition, of all the remaining space.

Note: A lot of people forget to create the swap partition.

Almost done, just Reboot
I just continued and completed the installation process, removed the CD and rebooted, and I was ready-to-go. GRUB installed automatically, and figured out its config based on the partitions. It made Linux the default boot partition, which suited me fine. You can always change the GRUB configuration if you want to change the order.

I configured my network connections, including wireless connections using the network configuration utility, and it all worked fine. Amen.

Troubleshooting
If what I described doesn't happen to you :), this is a good place to look for help. In fact, I read the whole article before I dual boot-ed my laptop just for some perspective.

The Creativity Manifesto

Two things happened today:
1. I got a mail - out of the blue - from a friend about my blog
2. I read Hugh MacLeod's (yeah, the same guy whose cartoons appear on my blog) manifesto called "How to be Creative". It is actually an old article, first showed up in his blog. Somehow, I missed reading it until now.

I don't know exactly what connections my brain hooked up, but it propelled me out of my bloggers' block. So Happy New Year and Compliments of the Season :).

If you have an hour to spare, read the manifesto. If you don't, make that one hour. Hugh's work is very intriguing. It slaps you in the face and then gives you a shoulder to lean on. Ever had the truth written down in your face in a size 48 font? As I read it, I felt rebellious and depressed, ecstatic and angry, enlightened and dumbfounded, empty and inspired.

Some things that stuck, and my reactions to it (hopefully, this will encourage you to read the whole article)

Guard your freedom. Rather, define what freedom means to you and guard it with your life (and career).

In what Hugh calls the "Sex and Cash" theory, he says creative people have 2 kinds of jobs (at the same time) - one has sex appeal, the other pays the bills. Reading that sorted out my theory of an Ideal Job (that there is no such thing) - it showed me another way to think about it.

Everyone has his/her Big Dream - their Mount Everest to climb. Admit yours, and make a serious attempt to make it happen - before you have all the time to regret not doing it. And when you do it, make sure you put in those hours. Its hard work and pain - deal with it.

Avoid the "run-of-the-mill", "another-brick-in-the-wall" kind of people, what Hugh calls the Watercooler Gang. I agree with his reasoning - we're mired in mediocrity, allow the mediocre mindset to creep into our behavior and ambition. Everyone has the ability to think differently - your mind is your fingerprint.

Do it for yourself. Not for money or fame or to impress someone. If you have any talent and passion, you have this innate need for accomplishment - something only you can define, that transcends most imposed boundaries. Sounds like a spiritual lecture. Partly true.

Moral of the story: Sing in your own voice - and put your heart into it.