Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

I just finished reading Business Week’s article on whether outsourcing to India will hurt America’s supremacy, and feel cheated of my time. The article profiles two students, one in America, another in India, telling how their fortunes have changed since when they started university. The article then ends abruptly saying that since American companies have more cultural diversity, they are secure long term.

WTF? I paid Rs. 95 to read this crap?

Plone 2’s CMF Quick Installer Tool is nice!

I may not be long haired anymore, but that does not mean I cannot live in the past. New userpic, full size here.

Have you observed that in Bangalore, when the roads are jammed at a traffic signal, a stream of two-wheelers takes to the pavement, looking for gaps that they can squeeze into?

I was waiting at a signal in BTM Layout last week when the stream suddenly dried up, two-wheelers jumping off the pavement in a great hurry. There was this visibly agitated old man waving his walking stick at the next vehicle, threatening to knock them off if they didn't get off the pavement themselves.

I’m testing Skype, a P2P voice telephony app. Could one of you Windows users give me a call please? Send me an IM reminder first: I don’t keep Virtual PC running all the time because it is a resource hog.

Two people I met IRL for the first time today: themadman and sweta_mogra.

For lunch today, golisoda and I went to themadman’s new restaurant on CMH Road. Madhu used to be webmaster of Cyber India Online and later, CNet India (at the same time, I was webmaster of arch-rival ZDNet India). Then CNet bought ZDNet, and in the process of merging operations worldwide, rolled CNet India into ZDNet India.

Madhu spent the next few years as a user experience professional, before formally entering the food business last year.

Madhu’s restaurant Shiok serves far-eastern cuisine. The word “Shiok” is Singaporean slang for “damn good” or “yummy.” The locale is upmarket, the ambience is great, and the food, shiokla! If this was last week, this would be the kind of place to take your valentine date to. Madhu recommends visiting after sundown, when he has greater control over the ambience.

A few Several small tweaks, and I’ll dump Safari for Firefox.

Firefox does JavaScript better, but Safari’s UI has the superior polish that GUI-heads like me expect. Firefox is getting there.

Not a time travelling machine. A time manufacturing machine. The MBA types call it productivity.

None of the invites I’ve sent from Orkut have reached their recipients. Not one. And yet, other notices from Orkut arrive just fine. Is anyone else having trouble inviting people?

Eric Sink of SourceGear (remember AbiWord?) writes on starting a software company. These closing words echo with my own approach:

My favorite solution to this problem [of obtaining seed funding] is to start out as a consulting company and evolve into an ISV later. SourceGear was built this way. The concept is simple:

• In your first 40 hours per week, build custom software or websites for other companies. Charge them enough money to pay your expenses.
• In your other 40 hours per week, work on building your product.

After the product is released and its revenues start to grow, you can gradually stop taking contracting gigs.

Read the full article at MSDN »

So I’ve finally given in and signed up at Orkut, primarily to grab “jace” before it was gone. Friend me up.

Today’s discovery is this utterly delicious IRC client. And open source too!



The toolbar icons and colours could do with some tweaking, but the rest of the UI is simply loveable. Look at the screenshots on the site for more.

One annoyance of working from home is having to answer the door every few hours, only to find a salesman outside. Does it help to have a “salesmen not welcome” sign on the gate? Do they actually acknowledge such signs?

My Apache 2.0.40 server on Red Hat 9 is writing logs like this:

161.74.11.24 - - [10/Feb/2004:05:29:46 051800] "GET /pics/lj HTTP/1.1" 200 8122 "-" "Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)"

Notice the weird time zone. This is a bug that was fixed in 1996, seven years ago. Why is it showing up now? Is anyone else seeing this?

Update: This bug has already been fixed (again). Now to find RH compatible packages of 2.0.48.

Update 2: I back-ported the fix to RH’s packages. Here is how you patch your copy:

Read on...

Them: I’m so modest!
You: Oh, you’re so modest!

Them: I’ve done X, Y and Z.
You: Oh, so cool! You’ve done X, Y and Z!
Them: It’s no big deal really. I have no experience with the rest of the alphabet.
You: But it’s still so cool! And you’re so modest too!
Them: Umm, ahh...

The third type make no opportunity for such a discussion.

... for here comes the Google Effect.

In other news, NetCraft is having fun at SCO’s and Microsoft’s expense.

golisoda, killapop and I were walking back to the Mahiti office a half hour ago when we saw someone using a Palm m100 at the corner store. A salesman, using some sort of sales tracking software (the UI didn’t look familiar). He said he was from HLL.

An Indian company that equips field workers with PDAs? I’m impressed.

A year ago, vinit and I were thinking up business ideas and he suggested enterprise handheld software. I shrugged it off saying the Indian PDA scene just wasn’t happening. Now I feel stupid.

Another recent discovery: Eicher’s selling GPS GSM devices that send headquarters updates on what part of the country each truck is in. Imagine what a large shipping company could do with this.

Anyone from HLL with more info? quark? kanishka_sinha?

I’m in some place called Dronachalam right now. In a train to Bangalore. I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I’d get online.