CodeNenu

Cutting down to size

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:27:31 +0530

tambrahmrage:

Based on contributions from @sree_ganesh and @saffrontrail

Lets Fight

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:43:17 +0530

I have principle and no power

You have power and no principle

You being you

And I being I

Compromise is out of the question

So let the battle begin…

I have truth and no force

You have force and no truth

You being you

And I being I

Compromise is out of the question

So let the battle begin…

You may club my skull

I will fight

You may crush my bones

I will fight

You may bury me alive

I will fight

With truth running through me

I will fight

With every ounce of my strength

I will fight

With my last dying breath

I will fight…

I will fight till the

Castle that you built with your lies

Comes tumbling down

Till the devil you worshipped with your lies

Kneels down before my angel of truth.

Written By Bhuchung Sonam

Solve meaningful problems as a startup

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 05:00:36 +0530

Solve meaningful problems as a startup

How to Win Back Lost Customers

Wed, 30 May 2012 00:35:39 +0530

How to Win Back Lost Customers

10 Lessons Every Entrepreneur Must Learn

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:55:47 +0530

10 Lessons Every Entrepreneur Must Learn

Customer Development Manifesto

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:14:51 +0530

There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside

Pair Customer Development with Agile Development

Failure is an Integral Part of the Search for the Business Model

If You’re Afraid to Fail You’re Destined to Do So Iterations and Pivots are Driven by Insight

Validate Your Hypotheses with Experiments Success Begins with Buy-In from Investors and Co-Founders

No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers Not All Startups Are Alike

Startup Metrics are Different from Existing Companies Agree on Market Type –It Changes Everything Fast, Fearless Decision-Making, Cycle Time, Speed and Tempo

If it’s not About Passion, You’re Dead the Day You Opened your Doors Startup

Titles and Functions Are Very Different from a Company’s Preserve Cash While Searching.

After It’s Found, Spend Communicate and Share

Learning Startups Demand Comfort with Chaos and Uncertainty

Empire Avenue | ROBUS

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 12:27:40 +0530

Empire Avenue | ROBUS

“9” by Thomas F

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:12:46 +0530

“9” by Thomas F

RT pls #Whitney Houston is a legend who will never be forgotten. Check out her 10 best songs @addthis - ad

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:40:09 +0530

RT pls #Whitney Houston is a legend who will never be forgotten. Check out her 10 best songs @addthis - ad

bluepueblo: Green Tea Field, South Korea photo via noseatbelts

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 06:52:32 +0530

bluepueblo:

Green Tea Field, South Korea

photo via noseatbelts

parislemon: Fathoming Facebook

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:04:50 +0530

parislemon: Fathoming Facebook:

parislemon:

Amidst my snark, there are a few high level things about Facebook’s numbers that I find interesting.

First:

So Facebook had nearly double the profits of Amazon in 2011…
— MG Siegler (@parislemon) February 1, 2012

Second:

Facebook revenue and profit are both about about 1/10th…

yongfook: Design is Horseshit!

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:58:36 +0530

yongfook: Design is Horseshit!:

yongfook:

In direct response to: http://designerfund.com/infographic

I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design. I love good design in all forms - copywriting in particular fascinates me. I’ve never called myself a designer.

Here’s my pitch. This…

A "Holy Fucking Shit" Quarter

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:29:22 +0530

A "Holy Fucking Shit" Quarter:

parislemon:

Remember back in October when after a rare “miss” by Apple (which was only a miss because analysts are stupid and lazy), the early signs pointed to the potential of a $40 billion quarter? Some thought that was insane given that Apple had never even had a $30 billion quarter before. Well, turns out that projection was a little insane — insanely low.

Try a $46.33 billion quarter.

It’s a number so insane that it even destroys the $42.76 billion blow-out “whisper” number.

As for the early projections of 34 million iPhones sold — which again, some people thought were crazy — also low. Try 37 million.

But hey, Android is winning, right?

As for the other numbers. 15.43 million iPads. A record. 5.2 million Macs. A record. 15.4 million iPods. Not a record, but no surprise — this is the age of the iPhone.

Net quarterly profit was $13.06 billion. Again, holy shit.

That stock you were an idiot for selling after aforementioned “miss”? Up 10% now in after-hours trading, well past $460 a share. By far an all-time high, pushing Apple’s market cap well past $400 billion.

I’ll be listening to the call at 2PM PT and posting some follow-up thoughts on TechCrunch. Stay tuned.

The Nokia Lumia 900

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:13:55 +0530

The Nokia Lumia 900:

parislemon:

I think Farhad Manjoo has this exactly right on Twitter:

The Lumia 900 is the first phone since the iPhone that I want without even touching it. bit.ly/zMeyqd
— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) January 9, 2012

I have yet to touch this (or the Lumia 800 for that matter), but what was shown today immediately makes every Android phone look like shit. Well, the iPhone has done that for years. Even more like shit, let’s say.

This is how you need to make a phone in the post-iPhone world. I fully intend to try this phone out to see how it stacks up against the iPhone.

See, it’s not that hard. Make something that looks awesome with a clear attention to detail and people like me will want to try it out. Hopefully this quiets the notion that anything that’s not the iPhone will get no love simply because it’s not the iPhone. (Sadly, it won’t.)

The iPhone is a great product. To beat it, you need to be better than it. No one has done that yet — but even worse, it hasn’t looked like anyone was even trying until now.

Coincidentally, it was exactly 5 years ago today when the iPhone was first unveiled on stage during the Macworld keynote in 2007.

APPLE vs GOOGLE

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 06:31:33 +0530

Source: Robin Wauters

MG Siegler argues that if you sold your Apple stock last October, right after the company’s Q4 2011 earnings report, you are an idiot and/or a moron. After all, Apple’s stock price closed at $398.62 on October 19, and it closed at $422.4 last Friday (a respectable 6 percent bump).

So selling your Apple stock that day was idiotic, right?
Maybe, maybe not.

Flamebait headlines aside, for all we know you could have been selling Apple stock you acquired back in 2000, in which case I daresay you were a true visionary. Of if you spent the money to buy your kids and spouse some nice Christmas gifts, or treated yourself to that plane ticket to Cambodia or whatever.

Reality is that, yes, Apple stock was staggeringly oversold on October 19, but I’ll be damned if I’m calling anyone an idiot over doing it if I don’t know what you did with the money.

In hindsight, it may have been smarter to hold on to it, but that’s the harsh reality of the volatile stock market for you. If the future could be accurately predicted, we could all make a killing.

Now, a decidedly smart move would have been buying Google the very same day you shouldn’t have sold AAPL. On October 19, 2011, GOOG closed at $580.7. Last Friday, stock price reached $652.73. That’s a 12+ percent bump, or about double the gain Apple saw in the same timeframe.

Now, if you sold your Apple stock in October to stock up on Research In Motion or Nokia instead …

Story of Average Indian ‘Techie’

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 04:06:35 +0530

Note: I am just reformatting + putting this in one piece rather than have it split across multiple comments on reddit. Am not the original author

Beautifully laid out by someone in the under-trafficked r/india:

my state has 300+ engineering colleges and my parents decided that i am going to be an engineer. so, i wrote an exam and got into one institute (luckily i can make it into a good institute where there are campus interviews.. the luck being i might have gotten 2 multiple choice questions correct than an unfortunate guy who will be discarded by our society)

Here i am in college. Nothing big here, professors are very friendly and if you are good to them(i always made it a point never to refuse whatever they ask „, please do not think i am homo), they will give marks, or you can later request them and because your future is at stake they will give you some marks.

when the admin password for our oracle installation did not worked, my professor in DB class wondered if we could have tried it with some more s (***) instead of 6 *s(as in ***). This is one of the A+ rated institute in the country and the professor is a phD in CS. No, the password is not made of * characters.

In the examination we are supposed to write the code (yes, the code) on paper and submit it. Most of the guys did scored more than 80% by writing an universal program (includes, defines, main (), some function names related to the problem, the usual i j k and l, loops and finally adding fflush () and return at the end ) nobody can dare try to understand what is in between.

We had this big campus placement drive, when we got the usual aptitude (if ram worked for 4 days and shyam for 5 days, in how many days the work is completed) and tricky questions ( can you write a one line c code to find if a number is even) and the most complex of them (string reversal, tree traversal) questions, leaked one day before from the previous college the company went to recruit. we all prepared well and some got lucky. most of the times, even if fail to answer any of the questions, but smile pleasantly, you got in. sometimes, even the smiling part it not necessary, you just have to act how stupid they are to ask such questions to you..

when we joined this big company, we got trained in how to use the PC and every programming language and every operating system and every technology, each one not taking more than a couple of days. We worked hard and successfully completed the training. the test is on a PC, but the question bank is known (airtel friends ad).

Now, we are put into a project, we are given a contact number of the manager and office location and were told to meet him there. we, group of 3 people (we are friends by now) try to locate the manager hard for 2 days and finally get hold of him. we explain him that we are sent by Ms.knowallthingsbutactuallydumb to work in (t)his project.

He jovially introduces us to the technical lead. TL says he will give work after some time, but meanwhile asks us to 1) collect all the birthdays,contact number, mail id, designation details of all the team members, make an excel sheet and mail it to everyone. 2)sit with a senior engineer who is doing testing (pressing keys and entering some form data in a webpage and checking the output) and we enter the data all day and give him the screenshots at the end of day.3)attend team meetings (why we are the only ones to get there first and wait for everyone for 30 mts) make MoM and email it to every one and track the action items (yes, now we know these terms.. you cant put us in noob mode)

Then this goes on for 4 months, still no real IT work. we are wondering why we are not given any work (this is the 8th month we are in the company, drawing salary). we try to get some real IT work from the seniors, but they always seem not to notice us and not taking us serious. But, being new to the environment and in doubt of our capabilities, we let this go. we make merry of the free time, enjoying the cafeterias, making (cute) friends from other teams, roaming around the big campus and then one day, the manager calls us all in. this is not the typical meetings we are experienced with, because the manager talked to us into the meeting and scheduled it as high priority calendar invite, only to us, the freshers.

Wondering if any of us did anything wrong (it is a relief to find ourselves not doing anything at all, still) we walked into the meeting. The manager is very blunt. Higher-ups (client and Delivery manager) is questioning about the productivity and inquiring what the freshers are doing in the project. Manager tells us that we need to show output and contribute to the project work. One member replies him that we never got any work assigned. Manager becomes more serious. he questions our lack of initiative and tells us that we should deliver results. He calls the team leader into the meeting and tells him that we should be working on any pending issues and asks him to track our progress.

We are scared, confused, and do not know what to do. then the TL takes us to his desk and on a white paper strip (of size A8) draws a diagram (Euclid would know better shapes) explaining to us the product, process, standards, and every other thing (you should never touch the code, you should never email anyone without it being shown to me first …) and gives all of us guest permissions to a directory/machine.

We are all happy now, we got into real IT work somehow (may be the manager is angry, but we can impress him with our work later and change it). we also heard, if we perform better we will get sent to the USA and can stay there for 3-6 months. this really motivated us. we immediately logged into the machines, started reading the code.

We could understand nothing. The code is nothing like we wrote or tried to write during our college days, it is not even like whatever is taught in training. everyone of us scared now, we the freshers. now we talked among ourselves, first to know if other guy had any answers and then to know if they dont. to approach the seniors, who always seem to be busy, either at their workstation or at the printers (i do not know why such a rush at the printer area) and to disturb them with our silly questions seemed like bad to us. so we turned to GOOG.

everyday we gone through each source file (php, html, JS, shell) and googled the meaning of everything we do not know and that is everything. the TL never bothered us after the first meeting. we are also making notes of the things and looking back, i think we could have made a wikipedia then. such was our effort, but at the end of a couple of months it did not made any sense to us, except that we now know how to write a hello world alert page in IE (sorry, it is in HTML, JS).

So, we completed 1 year in the company. our reviews are coming up but we have not done anything yet. again we are in a panicky stage. Meetings are going on, but we are just continuing taking the MoM and distributing it. Now and then, we are hearing some terms (forms, tables, elements, script, position, width, validation, anchor, cursor, layout …) we learnt from exploring GOOG. it made us feel good, but we thought we are not IN yet.

Somehow we finished our annual reviews, all of us got mid-rating and manager explained to us later that we do not get much hike as our ratings are average. One of us who stayed late hours in office because he came late everyday(he lived in some faraway place) got 1% more hike than us.

This went on for 3 more months, we using GOOG to learn some terms, and doing some job works to other team mates. like one day, i stayed overtime, took printouts of the client webpages (pages and different instances) and stacked them neatly, so the senior engineer can go through them (i do not know the need for this yet), and like this another day, when i have prepared this big excel sheet and entered Pass/Fail from another automated report and this excel sheet generated some more sheets with nice charts. Another friend of mine tracked the billing hours similarly..

Then, one day the Manager again called us. Asked us what we are doing, and it is good to see that he is very satisfied with our work. The TL also gave a good feedback and told the manager that we worked independently and always helped the team. The manager nodded, and told the TL to send our resumes to client and put us into billing. Again, we are worried. Tension is on our faces, what to put into the resume, how to answer any questions from the client…

TL asked us for our resumes immediately, we prepared them and sent it to him, but prayed to god, there be no client interview. TL called us in and told us that he modified our resumes (what a relief, but wait) and added Web technologies (meanwhile clients also know our names as we are in CC list and in some group mail lists) experience and Enterprise Apps (Oh, its time for GOOG again, for us) so that it will seem relevant to the client. We wondered what will happen, if the client asked us questions on those and we do not get selected. TL told us not to worry, he will take care of it…(this time we are courageous enough to ask the TL, because we do not want to bow our heads before a white guy)

Then, after 5 weeks (client manager is busy or on vacation hence the delay) it is informed to us that we got selected into the team. As we are already there for the last 1.5 years and working in the project and familiar with web and enterprise technologies, the client had no objection for us to be in the project. we felt so happy, manager and TL both congratulated us, and it felt like a new job joining day for us..

Now, everything is set. forget the education, trainings, friends, politics in office„ Now all that is left on the highway is to cruise at whatever speed we allow ourselves. We are all so happy, and one of the friends is already planning to move to a better paying company after 1 more year of working in Web and enterprise technologies. I am already thinking about when to ask for onsite opportunity, whether i should wait for couple of months or make my wish known to the manager right now itself?…

So, the D Day has arrived. it is the day(remember, the speech in Independence day movie).Hence forth, i will no longer be known as just me, but as a techie (forward 1 year i can add Sr. before that).

My assignment and the Project?? Usability Project.. testing the clients web platform for its usability and generating metrics and reports in rich media formats.(now, you know why the rush at the printer)

- anonymous

Sounds very true, from second hand experience of people who are working there. Anyone with first-hand experience to corroborate this?

Tweaks And Geeks

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 06:14:26 +0530

Tweaks And Geeks:

parislemon:

John Gruber argues against Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion (itself derived from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography) that Jobs was more of a “tweaker” than a true inventor.

I’d still argue that Gladwell’s thoughts on this are interesting and worth thinking about. But Gruber is right to note that the issue is anything but black and white.

If you think about it, has anyone in the past 50 years been a true inventor by Gladwell’s stringent definition? I know the answer is “yes”, but it’s hard to think of people.

One name that comes to mind is Dean Kamen with the Segway. But you could argue that was just a “tweaking” of the scooter, I suppose. Plus, despite the initial hype, that device has changed the world far less than a dozen other things Jobs did.

What about the portable digital music player itself, which Gruber agrees is probably the closest thing to a “tweak” product that Jobs did?

If Wikipedia is to be believed, a British scientist named Kane Kramer invented it in 1979 with a device called the IXI.(Incidentally, Apple ended up hiring Kramer as a consultant and used him in an iPod patent legal case decades later.) But couldn’t you argue that such a product is really just a “tweak” of existing portable music players?

The first actual portable MP3 player was made by a company called Audio Highway in 1996. But couldn’t you just argue that it was just a “tweak” of the portable CD player, which itself was just a tweak of the cassette-based Walkman? They’re all the same basic idea, it’s the format for the music that changed.

And aren’t all of those just “tweaks” of any home audio playback equipment? Most work the same way, it’s just the portability that’s different.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

G+

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 07:28:40 +0530

3 reasons why people join ‘IT companies

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 08:28:30 +0530

Source by : yuvipanda

Source: Friend of mine who is sadly ‘training’ at a big ‘IT company’ now (He wishes to remain anonymous, and I could see why)

Because everyone else did
Because parents told
Because it will be very sophisticated and relaxing there, with lots of recreational facilities

I’m just going to leave this here, and hope that when this boom does bust, it doesn’t leave too many dead bodies in its wake.

parislemon: Netflix’s market cap has plummeted from around $15...

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:40:40 +0530

parislemon:

Netflix’s market cap has plummeted from around $15 billion to around $4 billion in just three months.

The company that could do no wrong for a long time, now can’t seem to do anything right. It’s fascinating.

The odd thing is that not all that much has actually changed over that span. Instead, this seems to be mostly about perception and that’s badly hurting their outlook. The price changes were necessary, but Netflix mildly fucked up the handling of them. The spin-off of the DVD business was also a good idea for the long run, but Netflix badly fucked up the handling of it.

Those screw-ups led to some customer defections, but not all that many. But those side-by-side with the content standoff most of Hollywood now seems intent on waging with Netflix makes the future outlook uncertain at best (a fucking nightmare at worst).

Netflix is a great example of a scrappy company totally disrupting a business model and destroying an incumbent (Blockbuster). But it turns out that the reward for all that hard work was simply turning the Eye of Sauron on them. Now that Netflix is the incumbent, Hollywood is out to grab the money as they beat the shit of them to assert their command.

The content business is a bitch.