thecruisemaniac.com

This is my first blog post from the ever-awesome BCB6.  And on Day 2, I’m at a session by @braindead_in.

The first point mentioned by Rajiv is thus: Incoming VOIP termination call into a PSTN / PLMN network is not permitted by TRAI.

Rajiv is proposing a VOIP group mailing list which can probably list possible solutions.  This is turning out to a very interesting discussion.

Pradeep asked a lovely question: Whats the penalty of making an PSTN terminated VOIP call.  How many days in jail, how much fine et. al.

The basic reason for this issue is the safety / security of the money in the hands of the officials.

And as yet, yes, VOIP is a multi-billion dollar jackpot in the waiting and its sad that we’re sitting on a goldmine and are not interested in making it more worthy!!!

Sunrise today morning… I dunno why it felt special!
- Taken at 6:33 AM on April 16, 2008 - cameraphone upload by ShoZu

I went on to upgrade my blog to wordpress 2.5 yesterday night and I really seem to like it now. The most evident of changes is to the admin dashboard which is really neat and clean and much more organised… It does scroll more than before but then WTH… its cool. And I’m choosing to leave the default blue colours on. They are definitely refreshing everytime I look at them…

The upgrade as the Wordpress team puts it, its just a 5 minute process…

1. Backup your database in-case things might go wrong… (Believe me, they wont!!! )
2. Deactivate all plugins from the admin panel so that they might not create problems!!!
3. Fire up FileZilla, traverse to your wordpress directory, delete wp-admin and wp-include folders.
4. Upload the new wp-admin and wp-include folders and continue overwriting the other files…
5. Take care as to what you’re overwriting from the wp-content folder… You might want to save the settings for the older plugins / themes / etc…
6. Assuming your blog is at abc.com/blog, point your browser to abc.com/blog/upgrade.php to migrate your wordpress mysql database to suit the new 2.5 version.
7. And you are done…

There are some things I noticed that’ve given me a lot of ease in handling my blog:

1. The Plugins section can now not only point to newer versions of plugins but also update them in one click… No more downloading the plugin from a 3rd party website, unzip, ftp upload, detect, activate… W00t!!!
2. Lots of Ajaxy goodness!!!
3. Widgets support built-in… No more hunting for specific Widget-enabled themes…
4. All my old themes seem to work… No breakages so far!!!
5. Multi-file uploader… And its flash javascript, I-Frame based!!! Looks cool! And the progress bar is live… Double W00t!!!
6. This is a guess: Because the wp-core has been tweaked well, as I read on other forums, it must be giving much faster page loads for the viewers… You peeps temme about this. The cache is being built with every ping… And i guess it’s gonna be waaay faster once the cache starts spitting pages!!!

The Wordpress team has done an amazing job with Wordpress 2.5. Congrats guys!!!

Catchup with life post…  Lotsa things… quick entries on all those!!!

Lots of things in the last 2 months… the most nerve wrecking thing being the loss of my mom… Something that none of us have been able to come out of…  It so happens that when someone shares a relationship with you thats deeper than being a friend, and suddenly, that person gets sucked out… the void is too hard to handle… neways life moves on… and so do have us…

The next topic of the post: the ever lovely and awesome BCB a.k.a. BarCampBangalore is back!!!  BCB-6 summer edition is happening on april 19th and 20th… The venue is IIM-Bangalore… Be there!!! I’ll be running around fixing up wifi for you peeps… Tats for sure…

The next most important topic of the post: Moto-dead… I’ve spoken about this for a very long time… And mentioned in my blog a couple of times too… This was bound to happen… Motorola Handsets Division being royally kicked out of the Motorola stable… atleast that’s how I choose to see it…

You cant be a blood-sucking leech in this age… you have to contribute or else you cease to exist.  I’d go by Motorola’s top brass’ move to do this… but it could have completely been averted.  They didn’t have to screw up. And screw up with so much perfection that nothing can correct it ever again…

Motorola is perhaps the only company thats been practising the jack of all trades in the mobile segment for quite a while. And guess what! It BACKFIRED!!! What else would you expect??? I may not be Trump but I can see through the lining to say that in today’s age where competing takes balls of steel, you had better not be playing around on the highway!!! You’d definitely get run over!!! Many a time..

And I’d say this with a lot of sadness that a Mobile giant simply went ahead and committed suicide!!! RIP Moto!!! The Razr was an awesome show… nothing else after that… Not one single mobile after that was even worth picking up and holding in my hands…

Coming to the next important topic, my conversation has actually changed places… Keeping in touch with poeple on twitter has become the in thing and the easiest thing in life now… A conversation, although asynchronous, is definitely conversation worth it when the whole discussion is available anywhere and althemore better when the participatory limits dont exist!

Twitter just takes chit-chat to the next level… The erstwhile Yahoo chat rooms concept with a bling from technology… converse from anywhere… anyhow…  Follow me on twitter to know more…

And there ends my hiatus…  Chao…

Google’s native Search application for Nokia devices is out… And it is plain Uber-Kewl!!! Sense and Sensibility! With a couple of questions from my side!!! B-) The application needs to be downloaded from mobile.google.com.

I pulled it up and gave it a test run on my mobile and here are the screen-shots:

The app loads automatically and displays this beautiful image on the screen… Aaaah! bliss!!!

It opens up to the Ctrl key on the E61i / Pencil key on other S60 3rd edition devices.

By the time you enter the search text, the internet connection is initiated in the background. More on this later…

And voila! The search results are displayed using the S60 OSS web browser!

Local Cinema search too!!! We cant book tickets using google yet!

The app integrates maps too…

Driving directions dint work for me though…

 Now that the screen-shots are done, I have my set of questions that I want answers for…

1. The Google search application selects my internet access point all by itself.  It does not have any settings… and the application does not ask me about the access point.  How does it know that I use Mobile Office???
2. Adding to point number 1, the search application basically opens the browser with a parameter being google.com/search?q=’search string‘.  Why does it need to have gprs / wifi running in the background???  The browser on opening proceeds to ask the user about the access point all again…
3. Currently the google search app only searches google.com.  Is in-device search in the pipe???

With that ends a nice blog post after quite some time!!!…

Due credit to bhuwan for the info…  Thanx pal!

When you’re sailing, and the sea is rough, and the most powerful beacon close to a shore goes off… what do you do??? give up hope and drown… or… now that you’ve seen the beacon, trust your instincts and give a shot for the shore…

I’ll do the latter… Rest in peace, Mom!!! You’ll be in our memories forever… Love you! Bye bye!!! :’(

Whats life without a fight? they say… But I was never prepared for this! Damn!!!

Tags: mom, life, death

Kumaraparvatha or KP as its fondly called by a lot of trekkers is one of the most beautiful peaks in Karnataka. Situated in the Coorg district, this place is awesome and is as amazing as nature can get. And for this reason, it’s frequented by a huge number of people… And for this reason, this place is sh*# screwed up…

Nisarga is organizing a backpacking program called “Trek to Clean” to Kumaraparvatha with the intent of enjoying nature in the best way possible and also cleaning up the place enroute…

This is happening on 15-16 December, 2007. Participants will leave from bangalore on 14th night and be back in bangalore on the morning of the 17th so that they can get back to work…

As I mentioned previously, the trek is a complete backpacking trek, so, everything is taken care of by the participants… From Cooking, to cleaning up the vessels to cleaning up the route and dumping the garbage collected. We will be providing the the tents and carrymats for you to rest yourselves during the night… So, rest assured, you will sleep with a satisfaction of having done something good… Oh! And, Nisarga will also provide you with the ration, vessels, the stove, gas and the likes for you to get your hands into the cooking department…

We expect each participant to pick up approx. 2kg of garbage in bags provided and we will ensure the safe disposal and cleanup of garbage once we touch the town limits… The collection of garbage is on you, the cleanup and disposal is on us…

The total cost of the trek inclusive of travel will be Rs. 1600 /-.

Those interested in the trek call me at 99453 94216 / Rajendra at 94480 38220 / karthik at 99800 17105 or mail us at info (at) nisargaindia (dot) com for more details.

The post is a bit late on the page as I’ve been quite caught with a lot of stuff to organize and lot of camps to take care of… But then, here it goes, Trek to clean!!! Keep your environment clean. And as we say at Nisarga, we have one planet! Lets not dig graves for our own future…

Disclaimer: This is a rock-solid rant!!! Read on…

The Situation:

We had to give our client an interim delivery on the project we were working on. A phase that involved testing third party code to ensure it was “without defects” so that we would be able to integrate it into our mainstream systems in the coming phases. And guess what… I was completely wrong about the “without defects” part of the previous statement.

Not only was the application badly written, but the third-party team changed the requirements doc without informing us. And to top it all, their build that was delivered to us did’nt contain a properly filled up “Known Issues” document! And my client intends to make it to the market before spring!!!

The Rant:

This is a case of really bad coordination and mismanagement. When there are three entirely different teams working out of 3 geographically different locations, it is IMPERATIVE that everyone is on the same page! Why on earth do we have E-Mail??? Why on earth do we have VOIP??? Why on earth do we have Phones???

If it is still badly coordinated, it boils down to only one thing: “The organization that wants to sell that code doesnt care about the customer!“  When you have something that you intend to sell, the first and foremost expectation should not be to make money!  It is to give something valuable in order to get the money you intend to earn!

And in this project that I’ve been working on, there have been some things that I’ve definitely been shocked to observe.  And I’d take them as stepping stones in handling things in my life here on…

1. You cannot work for just money!  You have to work because you love it.  Working just for money kills the output.  And you will get your money, but someone else will suffer.  And it will boomerang back to you!  Sometime later… But, definitely!
2. Realise that someday, you may have to eat your own cake!  That you made for money!
3. Please take pride in your work!  Life IS full of shit! Nevertheless…
4. When you make something for your customer, make it with a sense of respect.  It’s called duty.  Not JOB!
5. People want to pay!  Believe me! People want to pay.  But they also want something of more worth than the money that leaves their pockets.
6. The best guys in the market thrive because they give the customers an experience! Not a commodity! And there lies everything about money.
7. A customer would shell out a lifetime worth of savings to have an experience. Steve jobs gave people an experience with the iPhone! Nokia gave people experiences with the N-Series! Sony Ericsson gave people experiences with their Walkman phones!  People love experiences.  People cannot love a product.  It is an inanimate piece of sh**!!!

Now, coming back to the crux of my post, organizations become market leaders with the right perspective of a customer experience in mind.  And then, where does it go???  A lot of companies strive to push the envelope in providing a better and a more fruitful experience…  And a lot more dont!!!  They just start looking at the big bucks!  No more quality, no more happy customers.

And their organization is now thriving just on old relationships in business, and on scale that they have as a market leader.  But for how long? When people that are part of the organization fail to attach themselves to it, and they just do their “JOB“, we’re in for a landslide into the abyss…

Wake up big guys, wake up!!!!

Banner for BCB5! Uber kewl!!!

3 more days and then, its 2 solid days of networking, catching up with the latest crazy things inside of people’s heads, hackdays, gr8 entertainment, cool discussions, hallway talks, and the list is endless…

The BCB5 Winter edtition @ IIM-Bangalore is where you have to be this weekend!  Looking forward to the collectives.  Looking forward with more eagerness to those hallway conversations and networking that happens there!!!

Catch u there.  Look for my live updates on twitter, and the photos on flickr!

Chao…

Tags: bcb5, barcampbangalore5