Barkhagate and the internet

We have often heard, even in TV channel debates, that the media is not always true; that the journalists dont always break the story with the intentions of letting the people know the "truth". Barkhagate controversy is the real living example of this! Its a sheer coverup done by the media (not just NDTV but almost all the media houses - afterall you see the same advertisements on all the news channels!)

The only medium you probably ever heard of barkhagate is through the internet. But alas, we live in such a world (at least in this part of the world) where internet doesnt probably mean anything. We cannot get the kind of 'critical mass' that can scare the politicians or people with power (and who think they can do whatever they want) just over the internet.

Its probably time that India had a 'news channel' totally over the web - news created by and presented by the people themselves!

Just a thought at 3am in the morning. More on this when I wake up. gud nite!

"The Social Network" rocks!

Saw the movie today and absolutely loved it! Very well made, and great performances. Also was nice to see the real geeky stuff like wget and emacs talked about in the movie. Totally recommended!

Trolls on techcrunch

I am a fan of Techcrunch. I feel I am sometimes so glued to it that it often brings down my work-efficiency. But.. whatever.. I do like to sit back and relax in between those coding sessions when I am burning my keyboard with my lightning fast programming skills!

So, sometime back I saw this post by Vivek Wadhwa on techcrunch - talking about the various upcoming startups in Bangalore and other major cities in India. What eluded me most were the majority of comments - particularly by people I really term as trolls!

Its a perfectly benign post talking about entrepreneurship -something very very important for the economy of any developing country; the majority of discussion tha happens there is about "divorce"! It seems like these trolls are either "unhappily married" or a big fan of bollywood movies! But most importantly, they are probably the biggest moron the history of earth would ever see - what the f**k do they have to talk about western culture affecting their insecure lives when someone is trying to bring out the good that is coming out of our entrepreneurship industry.

I sincerely wish these trolls rot in hell! (By which I ofcourse mean that their OS gets hanged atleast 5 times a day!)

Panama is more targetable

The news is out. A new set of features were added in Panama today which allows the advertisers target their audience well. The specific targeting allowed are:

1. Geo Targeting - This was existing in Panama even before the launch today. Geo Targeting has been enhanced by adding more granular geo locations (like cities and zip codes).

2. Demo Targeting - This allows you to target your ad-campaigns to users which fall under a specific demography - like a certain age group/gender.

3. Ad Scheduling - This is the most important feature from my point of view. It allows you to target your ads only at a certain period during the day or only on specific days of week.

Along with all these targeting, advertisers can also place premium bids on specific targets. This is a huge improvement directed towards the advertisers ease of doing business with Yahoo! Looking at this in contrast to the earlier release which focussed on bringing variable minimum bid per keyword per advertiser and bring fairness in Yahoo's marketplace (but also got in the line of fire from many advertisers who did not like the idea of min-bids getting raised) this feature is something which will help Yahoo's advertisers to make the best of their money spent on the ad platform. Let's see how does this go with the advertisers.

Ahh! It feels so good to see something you worked on being launched for the whole world! One of the good things to work for an internet company like Yahoo!

International Cricketers attacked in Pak

Heard this news today which is still developing as I write this blog post. Srilankan cricketers were attacked in Lahore (Pakistan) today while their bus was arriving at the stadium where they were supposed to play the host team. 5 Cricketers (and very high profile ones like Sangakara, Chamida Vaas) have been injured.

The media reports say that the injury is not serious, but I wonder what effect will that have to their cricketing career. Time will tell more about the nature of injuries and how much time will it take for them to recover and get back in field again. This event is a very big blow to the sports image of the Pakistani nation. From my gut feel - it seems Pakistan is going to get boycotted from the cricket fraternity. Definitely they will not be able to host any match - not at least for the next couple of years.

My prayers go out for the players and others who got injured in this incident. Hoping that the Pak govt will do something to bring the culprits to justice!

Touch...

Just touching my blogger account after such a long time!! Its been more that 2 years that I last blogged. The world seems to have changed quite a bit since then...

1. Twitter came in to shift the focus from blogs to tweets
2. I joined Yahoo India and took UniversityHiring from full-time to part-time
3. Aayush joined Amazon India.
4. We shifted from one part of Bangalore (Millers Road) to another (NGV Koramangala) to another (HSR Layout)
5. Investment banks bringing a new wave in IITs - and then bringing darkness in global economy.
6. Obama bringing new hope for the world
7. Yahoo India launching some of the important releases (MRP) for Advertiser Apps.
8. Reorg within Yahoo hitting me hard - got 3 managers in a period of 1.5 years.
9. IPL bringing lot of players under a single umbrella - great perf by Rajasthan Royals last year - Pieterson/Flintoff getting 1.5 mn - really a blessing for him during recession :)
10. My GF shifted to BLR and since then my movie index has gone up dramatically. (Movie index is a term I just coined - mathematical defn = No of movies (non-pirated) watched in a week) - In short a loser got a life :)
11. Some great movies made people laugh/cry/think - Jane tu ya jane na, taare zameen par, slumdog millionaire, khuda kay liye, a mighty heart...
12. Many reunions with friends planned - none executed
13. My sister getting married...

On the other hand - quite a few things are still the way they were;

1. Metro train construction in BLR
2. Politicians never getting mature - every thing has a political impact - be it malegaon or mumbai attack or mangalore incident
3. My tummy
4. domestic airfares - actually went up and then came back to where they were 2 yrs back :)
5. I still sleep on a mattress without a cot :)

What else... nothing up on my mind right now... lets keep the rest of it for the next blog post.. hope the next interval is smaller that 2 yrs...

The story so far.. (Part 2)

[As posted by Aayush on the UiversityHiring blog]

So when the 4 of us decided that we are going to build such a placement office management software, the design discussions started to take place over GTalk :-) Initially we were pretty ambitious of the functionalities that we would be putting into the system. And you can't blame us...estimation is still a difficult problem in software engineering!
Apart from having design discussions we were thinking on the lines of how are we going to coordinate among ourselves while actually programming the functionalities. The best option seemed to be buying some hosting space and a domain name. After a long email thread of the possible names which included relevant names like placementhelper.com, placementholder.com as well as geeks names (and now seemingly stupid names) like technomaniacs.com and geekyfreaky.com, we selected eatbits.com to be a good enough website domain. We were yet to decide a name of our product...first let there be any product and then we would think of names!
The next 4-5 months (Dec 2005 - April 2006) were kind of event less considering the development of the software that we had conceived:

• Coordinating over GTalk every alternate day.
  
• No weekends. My Counter Strike practice had certainly taken a beating :-)
• Coding, debugging...coding, debugging
  

But during this whole development work we realized one very important thing - What they taught in software engineering lectures is actually true:

• Many a times under pressure of time and exhaustion after office, we started coding even before having a rough design in our mind. A typical code like helldesign is important. scenario talked about in many software engineering books. Almost always turned out to be extremely bad! So
• After coding like hell for days together, we later found out that there was a functionality that we had missed. And now to correct this required another brave programming effort. Not only it re-iterated the previous point, but also emphasized that changes at design level are the ones that require the most effort to implement.
• Very early we realized that we should put some customization into our system so if this software gets developed we can make it easily adaptable to many placement offices. And while putting in such generalizations another software engineering principle struck our minds - you almost always sacrifice performance when implementing generalizations.
  
• As we missed our self proposed deadlines one after another, we realized that surely estimation even in terms of time is not that easy.
• Initially we had taken up features and functionalities which didn't quite overlap so that the cost of integration was the least. But till a month back the only way we used to integrate the overlapping code was through taking a diff of the code files. And surely many a times we overwrote code, introduced new bugs and kept us wondering why is this not working now! So here comes another good old advice - always use a code management system like a CVS.
  

Though we learnt some lessons the hard way, we still had some good points to look back to and on which we never made any compromise:

• Proper 3-tiered architecture (which later on allowed us to make our software with MySQL)
• Using some design patterns efficiently
• Using good coding principles - so that we can easily understand our own code many months down the line (in this effort I read through many books like Code Complete and Writing Solid Code).
  

In the midst of all this chaos came April and Pango told us that IIM Bangalore is in need of such a software and that we need to give a demo of whatever exists in the name of placement automation software soon as their summer vacations are approaching soon.

The story of our first demo is a story for the next time...

How the story began

[As posted by Aayush in UniversityHiring blog]

It had been a couple of months since we all joined our jobs after graduating from IIT Kanpur in 2005. The first couple of months after joining a job are almost the same of all - you seem to be earning way too much (specially comparing yourself with the spending power you used to have during the student days). The first month you are generally skeptic with your spending, but with money pouring in your account at the end of every month and watching how everyone else's spending habit, you slowly start to give in.
This honeymoon period lasted for about 3-4 months after which I realized that my brain was starting to wear out. The tiny miny bits of what I had put into my brain at IITK started becoming difficult to recall. With ample of time to kill after company, my fingers were itching for some coding. No business plans, no entrepreneurship, no extra money...just some coding practice.
Around the same time Pango (Pankaj Goyal), who was then in his first semester at IIM Bangalore, contacted me with kind of the same request that he had made to me 3-4 times during the final year at IITK - we need to start something. At IITK, none of our plans went beyond the idea stage and my laziness and wing bazi were the primary reasons for that. But this time I was also somewhat serious. We discussed many ideas over phone/email and finally we pin pointed to developing a placement office automation software. Actually Pango was quite aghast with the paper work involved in one of the most premier B-schools in India. So a rough plan was rolled out to automate that. At this point we didn't have any short/long term plans of what to do after we developed such kind of a software. Atleast my short term plan was fulfilled - I was once again slouching on my chair and hitting the keyboard hard.
As I remember best, within a month Pankaj visited Hyderabad and explained this idea to his wingmates - Kapil and Mr. X. They instantly bought this idea for almost the same reasons as mine :-)
So this was how the team got together!

To be continued...stay tuned :-)

-Aayush