The startup Punchline

Ofcourse it will be ridiculous if someone doesn't knows what he is doing.
And as paul says if an employee can't give his job des in one line than you should fire yourself.

In the context of startups, if your idea is not simple enough that can be explained in a line than there is something seriously wrong.
Leave the complex ones to some big ones like microsoft.
Focus on niche.
Do one thing.
Do it good.
????
Profit !!

Browser marker

I need a marker for text in a browser.

And why will i need that? Well, to speed read.
Whenever you read a long article, usually there is very little actual material as compared to fillers.
Usually what you have to do is to seperate the wheat from the chaff. You do it as you read ( guys who don't do it suffer from what we call
'information overload')
Now with the marker, you'll mark the 'wheat' as you read and continue reading like there is nothing important in the article.
Once you have finished the article you just go through the things you have marked again and take it all in.

That's it ! Now u can read much more faster and remember what is important.

Feed icons

The feed icon which has almost become an industry standard after it's adoptaion by the IE team.
Now, it's designer Matt Brett has launced a website for it.
I'm all for this nice lovely icon.
You can help spread the word by either diggin it or at delicious.

PS: ironically the feed icon site doesn't have a RSS feed !!

RSS in Outlook 12

The microsoft outlook program manager recently announced the RSS integration in outlook. That sure is cool and there is nothing better than to have them integrated totally in outlook rather than relying on third party aggregators. I wonder how folks at attensa feel about it. They are trying to provide the functionality more or less which is coming in outlook 12 and they are still in Beta !! So, till they'll come out with there version 1.0 MS will be out with outlook 12. And there are a lot others doing the same thing. Bad for them.

I've been using attensa to manage my feeds for quite a few days and i must say that it works well considerting that it's still in beta.
Sticking with attensa till outlook 12 comes out.

Nice honda advt.

Have a look at yet another of gud honda ad.

Thanks picasa

Though in the system requirements section on the picasa website it is clearly written that it won't work for win 98 systems. But to my surprize when i took it on a CD-ROM when i was going home to install it a old, PIII 900 MHz machine with 64 MB of RAM not only did it get installed but worked perfectly too. (Except that it was unable to extract snapshot of the video files)

Thanks to picasa that i was able to show pics of 'Dhruv' to my mother.

As i said earlier now google just need riya to fill tha gap.

Going agile

Recently there has been lot of buzz around the buzzword agile software development.
Oops..did i just said it's a buzzword.
IMHO it's just old wine in new bottle. The quest to be more efficient and more productive is going on since the day the first company saw falling profits. In traditional companies teamwork was generally how well u get along with your boss and your coworkers. But in software develpment you this line is extended futher. Unlike the manufacturing factories there are no machies or processes to be made efficient, in software development all the team members are part of the machine and unless everybody works in harmony, you will have delayed projects or bad code written.
Wasn't great software made even before someone knew of agile practices?
Ofcourse there was but now as companies get bigger and development teams get larger these practices are just an easy checklist for the 'MBA' project manager.
Scrum and other such overarching agile methodologies are simply ways to enforce standardized positive behaviors upon otherwise mundane workers, or good workers lorded over by second-rate managers who themselves need some kind of framework to tell them how to handle their particular herd of cats. Managed-incompetence, you might say.
And since most software development managers have absolutely no idea how to program or design code so unless the actual team members interact with each other and do reviews and previews themselves ( which is what agile is about as nowhere there is team leader in agile development) there is hardly any chance of getting a robust product out in time.

Dilbert blog

Gud thing to take some time off and think about some nice little things happening in daily life.
Only a few days into it's inception and it's one of the highly commented blogs out there.

Back from hibernation

Been busy for a while. First went home for a few days as two of my cousins were getting married. Had a blast back home. (With my fav black suit back in action ;)). Danced non-stop in the 'baraat'. Ate great indian delicacies too.
After coming back, it was all work no play. Though took time off to catch two movies.

Lately india is buzzing with some great tech news.
First foss.in concluded with great succes and now bill gates is back in india on his fourth visit to make even greater announcements. Which follows close after cisco and intel too announced their investments in the country. So boom time for tech capital and jobs too as microsoft only will be adding 3000 more during next few years.

There couldn't be a better time for the tech geeks living in india.

Google Base

Google has virtually become a factory which consistently churns out products every 1-2 months.
Needless to say all it's web based products have to be scalable as ppl flock to use their product atleast once after it is released.
They seem to be in such a hurry that their products no longer have the trademark reliablity of "it just works". They are in all aspects "Beta". It happened with google talk, happened with google reader and it continues with google base.

As soon as i went to google base, you can see above what happened.

As they r google, and it's a web app we can expect that it'll be back on track in a few days.

Apart from that, there's a lot of confusion over what exactly is the use of google base.
For me, it's a one stop shop for all the "user generated content", u get assured google index and free hosting for lifetime. It can be a substitute to your blog, your flickr homepage or craiglist for that matter. It can provide free hosting to small business.

It can do a lot more than we can currently imagine.