meta blogging

@achitnis asked a simple question the other day on Twitter, and it occured to me that the only reason I haven't been blogging that I haven't had time to research and formulate my thoughts in a structured manner. Which may be a reasonable excuse. Or not.

So I've decided to blog even unbaked ideas, half-thought thoughts and at least the start the conversation. Leave me a comment or tweet back or grab me on IM or over coffee if you think the conversation is interesting and should be continued.

I'm going to think of a way to make my blog more wiki-like, so I can keep updating my posts and building upon them.

new music

Where do you find new music?
New not as in recently released, but new as in never heard before by you.

Odds are pretty high that you heard it in a friend's car or on their iPod, at a party or a YouTube link someone sent you.

Music is inherently social.
We like to enjoy music in company. And endorse our enjoyment by singing along, dancing to it, or even just tapping our feet. We pick up music when see other people enjoying the music.

Music on the web (and on our computers) sorely needs that social aspect.

Update:
Actually, there is one thing: some chat applications have a feature that changes your status to the title of music playing currently on your computer.

on indian tv journalism

With the 2009 Indian Election results slowly trickling in, I am happy to see how the people have voted. And even happier to see some of the younger and more educated candidates leading (as yet) over the incumbents.

In all this excitement, the media is, of course, most excited. I was listening to a panel discussion on NDTV.com and here are some of the striking remarks/exchanges that I have to report from 15 minutes of listening in:

--------
BJP chappie: We hold no one leader responsible for our performance.
Journalist (in all earnestness!): Sir, does that mean you have no responsible leader?

Yes, I would love for you to paraphrase what I say on a daily basis.
---------
Journalist to CPM: Are you regretting your decision to break out of the governing coalition?
CPM: No. We like to stand by our ideals and what we believe in.
Journalist: But in this era of coalition governments, shouldn't you compromise a little?

That's great. Urge him to compromise so you can catch him off guard. Oh, you don't play that game? You really believe he should compromise on his ideals?
---------
Journalist to BJP: Do you feel L.K.Advani has been let down by the party think-tank? I know you are a member of the think-tank so you will say no, but....

Haha. You don't say!
---------
Journalist to BJP rep: Please introspect.

What, are you confessing him?
---------
Journalist to BJP (Barkha Dutt, if I'm not wrong): Have you accepted defeat?
BJP: No, the results aren't final yet, and so far we are lagging. But we want to wait for the results.
Journalist: Once it is clear that you have lost, as it soon will be, you will have to concede defeat. In that case what will your comments be?

Phew. Why don't you stand for election with that attitude, miss?
--------

We have the media to hold a mirror up to the countenance of our political leaders. We need someone to do the same for the media.

the great indian election

Even though this Economist article says it all, the numbers signifying the scale of the national elections in India is something I just have to highlight by repeating here:

It will be spread over 5 stages,
taking 4 weeks and
involving 6.5 million staff.

In 543 constituencies,
4,617 candidates,
representing some 300 parties,
will compete for the ballots of an electorate of 714 million eligible voters.

In 828,804 polling stations,
1,368,430 electronic voting machines will be deployed.

It is hard not to be impressed by the process—and its resilience.

Do read http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13492427.
I so wish India had a provision for absentee ballot.

the stimulus package and the Valley

I was at a panel discussion hosted by Stanford's Venture Lab today called "The New Stimulus Package: What Does it Mean for the Valley?".

While a lot of it was plug by the panelists to promote their own organizations/businesses, and the rest too high level, there was some interesting information in there.

Quite a bit of money in the stimulus package is available to entrepreneurs, if they apply for grants. Obviously, their businesses must be able to justify these grants. The government is focusing on things like clean tech, energy efficiency, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. and so the money is allocated to these sectors. The numbers were from $500k to $20MM per grant.

The best part about these grants? They are anti-dilutory.

The amount of detail published (on recovery.gov, the stimulus package bill, etc.) by the government about the spending plan for the stimulus money is extremely impressive. It is available to everyone to comment, criticize and use. And people are doing it with a lot of interest.

The government itself is asking businesses and entrepreneurs to take initiative in this economic climate. See fbo.gov - Federal Business Opportunities.

Research institutions like the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories have a huge corpus of technologies unused for any commercial purpose that they are willing to let entrepreneurs use. Information about these is up on their websites, and anyone can partner with them to use their technology. Last year LLNL had 16 startups from existing technologies they had created but weren't using. And, they fund startups too.

The Fogarty Institute for Innovation does similar things around healthcare. They are part of the El Camino Hospital and are even helping a startup working on helping diabetics through social networking and an iPhone application prepare their grant application.

Movement of anything costs money. And government grants are not an exception. There are startups helping other startups get these government grants - they will do all your paperwork and grant applications for you, talk to legislators for you, etc. But a secondary economy was to be expected when sums of money amounting to nearly a trillion dollars are involved. It is not surprising how middle men are everywhere, and how quickly any vacuum is filled up.

Every sector has a detailed plan of how to spend their money. Except for education, which has $60 billion allocated. No one knows what to do with education!

There are some slides with exact numbers about the amounts of money involved and how it is all allocated and where the opportunities are. I'll link to them once they are up.

tinkering

Among hype about everything Twitter, one that caught my eye recently was Tinker.

It is a simple idea but extremely powerful in its ability to go viral. It is based on searches on Twitter and people create Events and provide keywords that might be used in tweets talking about that event to find tweets about that Event. Their website, of course, will show-and-tell you more.

These "Events" have a much larger scope than just real-life events that seem to be the focus at the moment. Essentially, discussions involving any entity can be tracked using the appropriate keywords. I really like how Tinker has packaged a simple use of the Twitter Search API - making it viral through widgets and a community. It is also mind-bogglingly easy to find events and track them - browsing and a click will suffice for the popular events. Most people using Twitter would be tech-savvy enough to be able to search using the right keywords and add the resulting feed to their feedreaders. But the concept of sharing "Events", finding those created by other users is very cool.

Something Twitter ought to have done already?

And this question re-inforces my belief that Twitter is a platform. But does it think and behave like one? In its quest for a business model, perhaps not. How about letting others in this ecological system find the business models and share revenue?

Coming back to Tinker. Play around with for 5 minutes and you will see that it just displays tweets that match certain keywords. And raises the question: what does Tinker not do. It does not make it easy for you sift through the numerous tweets about an event and glean information from there. Which, I would assume, is crux of the problem.

And since that is not enough food for thought, do not miss reading http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/twitter-analytics-analytics/ where Zach Gemignani talks about analytics as opposed to just metrics and shows some very interesting things he's done with the Twitter data.

CrisisOfCredit.com

CrisisOfCredit.com explains it perfectly - with a very simple animated story:


(via @vineeth)

The creators of this video did not close the loop completely. The investors at the end who have lost the money - where does their money come from? The creators of wealth in any economy are the workers, at the bottom of the chain in our case. These workers - you and I - want to give our monies to these investors in the hope of getting back "more" "later". And we keep asking for more - from our pension funds, from our 401Ks, from our insurance plans. This money comes back to us when we take a loan or a mortgage, leveraged many times over. We validate the business model of these investors.

Essentially, everyone is borrowing money from the future because we are too greedy to sustain ourselves on what we have today.

mac & pc, pc & mac

It's interesting how the two brands have evolved.

PC stands for Personal Computer - a very generic term. Yet it has come to mean a computer running Windows. And Windows has captured the mindshare associated with personal computers. Mac, not meaning anything, has evolved from the opposite direction and has come to mean everything the PC is not. In doing so, it has captured the same mindshare associated with personal computers.

books

I went and got myself a bookcase yesterday, and took my books from Bangalore out of their carton. I should have done this ages ago. There is something about having books around that makes the place feel more like home. Something old and familiar.

When I found only a handful of books in the carton, I realized just how many I have left behind. There was a brief moment of regret, but then, it's good to have space for newer books. I used to read a book a week; sometimes, more. This has steadily been decreasing over the years. I have just finished The Watchmen and as I try to think back to what I had last read, I see Atonement in my reading list on this blog on the left. That was 9 or 10 months ago! I have read Neil Gaiman's Sandman series since, but that's hardly a consolation.

Just got Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit and The Execution of Justice. Wikipedia describes his works as "macabre satire"! I'm looking forward to reading these.

man on wire

Phillipe Petit's style of narration draws you into his story - exactly as many other people with him in the film aver to his way of pulling others into his life, his dream, his story.

Makes one wonder what capacity it is in us to make anything into a piece of art. Something beyond just a Darwinian sense of survival, I hope!

Man on Wire is one of the most beautiful love stories I've seen. Yes, love story. Partly because it is not about love.

hello world, again

It has been a long blogging break. And a lot has happened since the last time I blogged.

I moved to the San Francisco bay area and have just been terribly caught up with settling in.

In the whirlwind of the past two and a half months, I've sneaked in a skiing trip and a week with old college friends who are here in the USA. I've also started taking an evening course at Stanford on product strategy. Lots of more things on the agenda, so keep listening!

I find a lot less free time here than I had in Bangalore, so blogging is going to be brief. But I hope I can keep it up, nevertheless. I'm more active on twitter, where the Conversation is. And is a better place to find me alive and kicking.

dusk

the light, one evening, from my verandah:

what makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial

A great read:
http://www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/What_makes_entrepreneurs_entrepreneurial.pdf

The paper talks about Causal Reasoning and comes up with a concept called Effectual Reasoning in contrast that is an inherent quality of entrepreneurs. This scanned document also has bonus comments pencilled in by someone (someone from Khosla Ventures?).

motivation, or the lack of

Abraham Maslow was a renowned anthropologist, best known for his concepts of the Heirarchy of Human Needs.

Human needs are grouped into five categories with various priorities. The lower ones have to be satisfied before the higher needs can act as motivators. A hungry programmer can hardly be motivated to write good code.

One is always shifting between these levels, satisfying multiple needs simultaneously.

The need for self-actualization is notoriously insatiable. "Ultimately happy" is how Maslow described it, which in itself sounds dubious. One is always left wanting for more.

Peter Drucker, another renowned man and a management guru, disagreed with one tenet of this heirarchy. His argument was that as a want approaches fulfillment, its capacity to reward, to act as an incentive, diminshes greatly, while its capacity to deter and act as a disincentive increases.

If you put the two points together - the one about self-actualization being a danger zone, and the diminishing returns from the lower needs - you will see how being only in the upper level of the hierarchy can be dangerous business. Here there is a high chance of ennui setting in, becoming blasé, and getting engulfed in a universal demotivation.

Being grounded in the lower levels is how one can stay focussed on the matter at hand, on real progress. Perhaps this is what Steve Jobs meant when he said "Stay hungry, stay foolish".

missing from google's index

A few days ago, one of my posts went missing from Google's index.
Which was rather strange because I had checked a few hours after publishing it that it was turning up in Google searches and Google Analytics had already started showing me hits on my blog because of that post.

After some digging around I found out that pages get taken out if a spam site links to them and then those pages are inspected in detail before putting them back in the index. And, if the page links to a spam site, it is taken out immediately and kept out. The latter turned out to be the cause of the post going missing. A spam site had left a "backlink" to my post and the post was inadvertently showing the link to the spam site. So I went and disabled all backlinks and the next day my post was showing up again!

The curious thing is that links in comments and backlinks/trackbacks usually have a rel=nofollow set. So I can't imagine why that backlink would have had any affect, but mysterious are the ways of Google. ;-)

marketing essentials

I recently spent a couple of hours doing an online Marketing Essentials course from Harvard Business School. Here is what I figured is the gist:

1. Understand the fundamental need behind demands.
2. Meet customer needs. Then exceed expectations.
3. Keep the conversation with the customer going.
4. Embrace change.
5. Everyone is a marketer.

All else derives from the above.

[Update: added item 5]

post photos from Nokia E71 to wordpress directly

That is what I initially wanted to do. But this is more about post images or videos to any service for that matter, from any Nokia phone that can run Share Online. But I've tried this for images only from my E71, using Share Online 3.0 to a PHP service.

One day I saw something funny on the road, drew my phone, took aim, and shot. And was inspired enough to want to set up a proper photoblog for candid shots, for all of half a day! But regardless of me eventually not putting up a photoblog, I decided to poke around to see if I could do this in principle. And here is the result of a day and a half of hacking about.

Share Online 3.0 comes pre-installed on the E71, but without Flickr as an option. Their FAQ pointed me to the configuration file to get Flickr in to SO. If you overlook the junk in it (that is the flickr icon, base64-encoded), it looks very simple. Publishing uses the Atom Post protocol and WSSE for authentication. Tweak the media_options section to add video/3gpp or video/mp4 if you like. Change the endpoint_path to your own service and point configure_file_URL back to this configuration file. And you're done.

Here's how my configuration file looked like: http://umangjaipuria.com/share/uj_configuration_file.cfg.
Copy the file over to your phone and open it. The E71 automatically recognized it as a Share Online service configuration and added "UJ" as a new service. Options -> Add new account on the phone will let you specify a username and password for the service.

Every request by Share Online to your service will have authentication requirements. There will be a HTTP_X_WSSE parameter in the http headers. It will look like this:
UsernameToken Username="user1", PasswordDigest="4bHGUQyK7n/2JtGo/Tbjsr0aFww=", Nonce="NrS4fnwVWDB5QiIVR0qtIQ==", Created="2008-10-02T06:30:33Z".
Parse the string to extract the various name/values pairs. WSSE authentication can be checked (PHP code here) with:
$mydigest = base64_encode(pack("H*",
sha1(base64_decode($nonce).$created.$correct_password)));
The string in $mydigest should be the same as the PasswordDigest field in the WSSE string.

The first time Share Online tries to get a list of actions possible with this service (the Update Service operation under Options). This is the only GET operation and thus, for all GET requests (upon successful authentication, of course) my service returns:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed version="0.3" xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">
<link rel="service.post" href="http://myserver.com/nokia_shareonline.php" type="application/atom+xml" title="my photoblog">
<link rel="service.feed" href="http://myserver.com/feed/atom/" type="application/atom+xml" title="my photoblog">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://myserver.com/" type="text/html" title="my photoblog">
</feed>
With Content-Type set to application/atom+xml.
This tells Share Online where to make POST requests, amongst other things.

Now, about that POST request. Log the HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA to see what the request actually contains. The Atom protocol, again. But for some strange reason, Share Online makes two POST requests to submit a photo. The first one is just the image and in this case the post xml will have this element:
<standalone xmlns="http://sixapart.com/atom/typepad#">1</standalone>
The next one actually contains the description and the title and tags that you had entered in Share Online. I'm not sure how to correlate the two - I guess you have to assume that only one client (per authenticated user) is submitting at a time and sequential posts are related.

Since I saw the SixApart.com link above, I guess this is the exact Atom protocol Share Online uses: http://www.sixapart.com/developers/atom/protocol/.

This can be made into a nifty little Wordpress plugin. Perhaps some other day, if I decide to set up that photoblog after all.

So far, I'm loving my E71! If you have any cool tips or tricks to share about the phone, please leave me a comment. And check back again soon - I'm going to write about the apps I've set up on it.

running

Animals run for the love of running.

Children run for the love of running.

I wonder what happens to us human adults that running does not come naturally.
After overcoming the initial unwillingness and a few minutes into it, running is the most exhilarating activity of my day.

elysium

(a bookmark of sorts)

Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum! Deine Zauber binden wieder, Was die Mode streng geteilt. Alle Menschen werden Brüder, Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods, Daughter of Elysium, Touched with fire, we come, Heavenly, your sanctuary! Your sweet magic frees all others, Held in Custom's rigid rings. Beggars and princes become brothers, In the haven of your wings.

The music, which completes the magic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqtZ_c3cyhE

tabs

Tabs (wikipedia article) have been around for quite a while. However, it was considered a breakthrough in browsing experience when Firefox popularized it and Safari and IE soon followed suit.

It must have made a big difference, at least for power users - all the clutter in the dektop taskbar was shifted into the tab-bar in the browser window.

object.render() ?
But if you look closely at it, tabs inside a browser window are hardly a UI phenomenon. They are, in fact, the simplest representation of how the browser stores webpages in memory. If a browser needs to keep multiple pages open at the same time, there would be a list (linked? array?) of these pages. Each of these pages has a history - a list of web addresses that had been displayed on the page previously. You could go back (and even forward!) in time, one step at a time. Does that remind anyone of stack-like behaviour? Just pop from the "back" stack and push into the "forward" stack.


Browsers are creating a visual representation of their data rather than figuring out the right user experience first and then making their internals provide it. Definitely the wrong focus. Check out the "Experience is the Product" slides here.








What's Wrong?
Tabs and their history are so linear it is constraining. Why is a workspace defined only by a list of URLs open at a given point in time? Why is browsing history confined to a tab? Even the Back button is pointless: once you go back and click on a link, the part of the history that was under the Forward button vanishes - like branching out to another time dimension. "Back" makes sense within a particular web application like email or in the context of doing a search. But not as a mechanism to traverse history.

Go Non-Linear
So how do we get out of the confines of linearity imposed on our browsing? For starters, get rid of tabs. And I don't mean go back to individual windows; I mean using tabs as they are meant to be - as containers for web pages instead of as focal points of browsing sessions.

Opening and closing of tabs should be seamless to the user - new ones opening up when required and older ones just fading away. As the sequence of browsing progresses, tabs that are not needed can be closed automatically. The unit of browsing should become the web application. For example, web search: I can have multiple tabs open while I'm searching for something and the "back" button should work consistently across them, allowing me to explore different websites at once, but always from the context of the search engine, jumping back and forth. The navigation needn't be tab-based as it is right now.

The History Too
"Back" for History is horribly broken. Browsing history can be delegated to a separate pane in the browser with items ranked either chronologically or by frequency or other ways that appear to the user as "views". A tree-like structure for history would be better than just a list of web pages. A powerful search on top of a longer window of history would fill in for the impossibility of capturing everything in a single view.

The browser can have two views - one where the user can see at a single glance the history and various browsing sessions currently in progress, and another where only a single browsing session is active and in focus. Currently browsers have only one view where a cluttered (and often barely usable) tab bar shows which tabs are open and the larger part of the screen shows one tab.

As browsers become more of a platform than an application, they are generating more interest and hopefully we'll see a lot more improvement, especially for the user experience.

[Update: As I finish writing this, Google Chrome is made available for download. They claim to have solved a lot of technical issues that people have been complaining about, and have made it open source. Hopefully the other browsers will have the good sense (and grace!) to build on top of this and improve the user experience.]